> My gut is telling me this is a metric to evaluate the education system for families to move there (or remain there).

Exactly. Their employees aren't going to want to move somewhere with bad school systems, even if SAT scores are largely just a measure of home prices. This doesn't strike me as being especially controversial.

Well they should cross Atlanta off their list then, Georgia is 31/50 for schools in the US.

Toronto is looking better now! We even have free Catholic schools!

Georgia is far more than just Atlanta. How does Atlanta itself rank?

It was tough finding a solid answer, but everywhere I looked, it was distinctly not in the top 10 or 20.

Yay for large numbers of first-generation Chinese immigrants!

I don't think Toronto stands a chance. Americans would not move to Toronto because 1) Wages are much lower in Toronto and I don't see Amazon paying twice the prevailing wage. 2) Americans would have to pay taxes in both Canada and America.

> Americans would have to pay taxes in both Canada and America.

You deduct foreign tax payments on foreign earned income against your US tax bill. My assumption is that Canada has higher or comparable tax rates to the US which makes this a non-issue.

If the taxes are higher it makes it an issue again. Only if they are the same or lower in Canada would this be a nonissue.

>And SAT scores gives you the outcome of K-12.

If you account for many other factors.

The percentage of students that take the SAT in a given area is often overlooked, but it varies wildly by state.

You also have to correct for racial/cultural, language, and income bias in SAT scores.

  You also have to account for racial/cultural,
  language, and income bias

Whatever backlash Amazon faces for asking for overall average SAT scores, it's nothing compared to the backlash they'd get if they'd asked for average SAT scores for white and asian kids from married two-parent families with a six-figure household income, english as a first language and both parents college graduates.

They probably wouldn't need to ask for this. They can just combine public data sets with the SAT scores to come up with a rough, adjusted estimate.

But that's assuming they'd even want to correct for any of the aforementioned biases. I doubt they care because their employees wouldn't care. "Good school" in some places often also means "white school" because of the nature of income disparities, but you never hear parents asking, "But when you say 'good,' are you adjusting for race?"

Unpopular truth... but most companies (and people) looking for places to move to will, in reality, factor those biases into their decision rather than correct them out.

Who honestly ever says, "Oh, this location is fantastic... as long as you close your eyes and imagine a completely different population living there!"? There are many moral considerations to argue, but raw outcomes do usually prevail.

Except I wouldn't call that a bias. Bias is prejudice, and in this case would mean something like hiring people for certain characteristics that are irrelevant w.r.t. to the job. Even where ethnicity and race are concerned, it doesn't necessarily imply bias. If, say, a black social organization only hired black people, it wouldn't necessarily be biased. Why on earth would they hire, say, white people?

If you were starting a company and you wanted to attract people that value education and want the best for their children and see SAT scores as an indicator of quality, then yeah, you'd do exactly something like this. There's nothing immoral about it, unless you want to debate the effect Amazon will have on the town. What's immoral is the weird guilt and self-flagellation involved in thinking there's anything wrong with it. Who gains exactly from plopping Amazon HQ2 in some shitty town?

If there's anything I worry about, it's the growth of Amazon and its bed fellows.

The gap between SAT/ACT is really important. In my state, SAT scores are actually really high - but it's only because almost everyone takes the ACT and the SAT is only taken by elite people.

Your comment is very on point. The situation where more elite students take certain tests makes it much harder to understand skills and achievements that come from different schools.

It's a very selective metric. Only college-bound kids take the SAT.

Yes, but virtually all of Amazon's white-collar employees have college degrees, and it's a good bet they expect their children to get them too.

More problematic for Toronto: Canadians don't usually take the SAT unless they are aiming at US colleges. Most don't.

Not in Georgia. They pretty much try to get everyone to take it here.

Yes. Most people who point to low standardized test scores in Southern states, and snicker about sterotypes, are probably unaware that the region is unusually insistent on high school students taking either the SAT or ACT.

Many Southern states require one or the other as a requirement for high school graduation, period, whether you're planning for college or not. And many others that do not require it pressure all students to take it by default:

https://magoosh.com/hs/act/2017/states-that-require-the-act-...

So of course your statewide averages will be lower than the national average, when the testing population in other regions is limited to college-prep students only.

Meanwhile I'm wondering why Amazon is optimizing for people with families, since it seems to be their MO to hire young people who don't know better than to work 60-80 hours a week.

Because those young people generally tell themselves that they want to settle down and start a family, so school districts seem important.

Is there any evidence that, once you adjust for parental income, ESL status, etc., SAT scores tell you anything about K-12 quality?

That doens't make sense. Cities typically have lower test scores than the wealthy upper class suburbs that surround them.