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The #1 public school in the US is Thomas Jefferson in Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS). FCPS is a suburb of DC, and a fantastic amount of the kids there are children of military servicemembers and FedGov civilians.

A lot of those well paid contractors are former military as well.

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Yeah, this is along the lines of my comment. (Am a military brat, attended some DoD schools, also attended a school in FCPS.)

The educational rigor across different districts is massive. Many military kids get to sample from it a lot of times (possibly even with a bias for FCPS in particular!); other kids get to sample it ~once. There is probably some huge reversion to the mean at play here.

Yup. I grew up and live in Fairfax County. The wealthy DC suburbs have schools that are so far better than the rest of the states (MD and VA). The massive differences between systems makes a state-level comparison far less useful.

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