A national business magazine has ranked school districts in Pittsburgh and surrounding communities as eighth-best among public secondary school systems in larger U.S. metropolitan areas.

Expansion Management magazine, in survey results released yesterday, ranked school systems in metropolitan statistical areas with more than 100,000 students. The magazine is a monthly publication distributed to executives of companies seeking places to expand or relocate their businesses.

Secondary schools in the Austin, Texas, area ranked first, according to the study, followed by those in the Washington, D.C., area; West Palm Beach-Boca Raton, Fla.; Middlesex-Somerset-Hunterdon, N.J.; Monmouth-Ocean, N.J.; Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C.; Phoenix-Mesa, Ariz.; and the Pittsburgh area.

Pennsylvania schools in smaller metropolitan areas also fared well in the survey.

Among areas with 40,000 to 100,000 students, secondary schools in the Harrisburg-Lebanon-Carlisle metro area ranked sixth. Those in the Lancaster area ranked eighth, and schools in Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton area ranked 13th.

In metro areas with fewer than 40,000 students, school districts in the State College area ranked first nationwide, according to the study.

State College Area School District also ranked first among all secondary schools studied, regardless of size, followed by Lawrence, Kan.; Charlottesville, Va.; Iowa City, Iowa; and Eau Claire, Wis.

The ranking used data from the Kansas-based magazine's 2003 study of 2,800 secondary school districts throughout the nation.

It compared school districts based on a variety of factors, including beginning and average teacher salaries, per student expenditures and student-teacher ratios. It gave particular weight to college entrance examination scores and graduation rates.

The magazine said it has conducted an annual survey of secondary school systems for 13 years to provide a means of gauging the quality of a community's workforce that businesses are likely to encounter. This year's study, the magazine said, is its first to focus on schools in metropolitan statistical areas, a term used to describe a city and surrounding communities that are closely related socially and economically.

"Just about every metro area in the country is faced with the same situation: an urban public school system with a high dropout rate and low test scores, surrounded by high-achieving suburban public schools," said the magazine's chief editor, Bill King.

By focusing on MSAs, the magazine said, its study provides a "means to compare the overall quality of public schools" among metro areas.

Not all of Allegheny County's school systems were included in the survey, which only rated districts with more than 3,300 students. Only 18 of the county's 43 school districts are that large.

That means the analysis would not include statistics from some of the region's poorest-performing districts, like Duquesne, Sto-Rox, Clairton and Wilkinsburg.

It would, however, include the region's highest-performing districts, like Fox Chapel, Quaker Valley, Mt. Lebanon, North Allegheny and Upper St. Clair.

The county's poor-performing districts are largely low-income, with higher minority school populations.

Officials for education groups said they were not surprised by Pittsburgh's ranking in the survey, based on the criteria that the magazine used.

Pittsburgh-area schools have a high number of state-certified teachers compared to other communities in the state and the nation. And students at area schools tend to perform fairly well on college entrance examinations compared to other communities, said Karen McIntyre, director of the early education initiative for the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit group that works to promote economic development in 10 area counties.

"We have pretty well-compensated teachers and a pretty senior educator staff, and we have a lot of good schools in the region and in Pennsylvania," said Ron Cowell, a former state legislator and president of the Education Policy and Leadership Center, a Harrisburg-based nonprofit group.

Both officials noted, however, that overall trends can obscure the fact that many students are failing to achieve.

"We have, within school districts and certainly across the state, huge achievement gaps among groups of students," including black and Hispanic students, Cowell said.

"While we ought to be celebrating a good report and relatively high ranking" in the magazine's study, he said, "we also must keep an eye on our target: getting all students to work toward a high level of proficiency."

Pennsylvania public schools were criticized last year for having one of the country's largest racial achievement gaps based on the far better performance of white students compared to black students in National Assessment of Educational Progress testing.

Also, a study released in February by the Urban Institute and the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University noted that only 46 percent of black students in Pennsylvania graduated from high school in 2001 (read article). That contrasted with a graduation rate of 81 percent among white students in the state.

For students overall, the most recent NAEP math and reading tests show Pennsylvania eighth-graders beating the national average, though fourth-graders scored around average in both tests.