5 Dumbest States in America

By Jerry Kronenberg

11/16/12 - 04:12 PM EST

BOSTON (TheStreet) -- Minnesota residents are at the top of the class when it comes to educational achievement -- but South Carolinians get an "F," we have found. 

A look at four educational factors -- average SAT math scores, percentage of citizens with high-school diplomas, how many young people attend college and how many high schoolers watch too much TV -- reveals wide variations among U.S. states.

For instance, just 8.2% of residents in first-place Minnesota lack high-school educations -- roughly half of the 15.9% rate in last-place South Carolina. Similarly, 80.4% of Minnesota's 18- to 24-year-olds are enrolled in college, compared with just 49.9% of similarly aged South Carolinians.

Boston College education professor Ana Martinez-Aleman attributes much of the variations to a single factor -- how much money states spend on public schools.

"There's a cause-and-effect relationship between school funding and educational achievement," says Martinez-Aleman, who also serves as editor of the scholarly publication Educational Policy Journal. (URL = exp.sagepub.com) The expert says some states have long showered their secondary-school and public-university systems with big bucks, while others have made funding about as hard to come by as an "A" in calculus.

"Public-school funding is primarily derived from property taxes, and [state and local governments] determine property-tax rates," she says. "The lower your revenue stream, the lower your ability to fund education."    READ MORE