School funding problems, including disparities between districts, have grabbed the headlines in Illinois the last couple of years. But a website recently ranked Illinois schools among the best in the country for teachers.
Personal finance website WalletHub said it looked at two broad areas when ranking the states:
One -- Opportunity and Competition -- included average starting salaries, income growth potential, pensions and tenure protections.
The other -- Academic and Work Environment -- included things like quality of the school system, pupil-teacher ratio, turnover, union strength and teacher safety.
Illinois ranked third in the first category and seventh in the second, giving it the third place overall among WalletHub’s ranking of 2017’s best states for teachers. By comparison, top-ranked New York was first in Opportunity and Competition, but 10th in Academic & Work Environment.
Illinois’s third-place ranking put it below New Jersey and above Connecticut and Pennsylvania in the top five.
Among neighboring states, Indiana was ranked 15th, Missouri 16th, Iowa 18th and Wisconsin 21st.
