Cities such as New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Silicon Valley and other metropolitan areas, also known as "Superstar Cities," are very effective at attracting highly educated workers. In a virtuous cycle, these workers migrate to where the interesting, highly paid jobs are, where other smart young people live, and where the cultural amenities make their nonworking life more fun. But workers are also attracted by the promise that their own children, when they are ready to start families, will get to enjoy high-quality public schools in their new home towns, as well. But is that actually true? Do the Superstar Cities boast better public schools than those in the Rust Belt or the Sun Belt? Business leaders often say that the quality of local schools is a key consideration when they are choosing new locations for corporate headquarters or a manufacturing facility. But are they looking at the right data when judging school quality? Using the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), the Fordham Institute is using these data to build valid comparisons at the metro-area level for schools across the United States. Although workforce data or other social outcomes (such as unemployment, earnings, or criminal-justice data) may reflect the impacts of the local education system, they have included the measures that are most clearly connected to school effectiveness and that are available nationally at the school district level, including the following: (1) academic growth; (2) academic growth for traditionally disadvantaged students; (3) improvement in achievement in recent years; and (4) high school graduation rates. The Student Learning Accelerating Metros (SLAM) rankings correlate far less with family wealth and student demographics than do pure academic achievement ratings. They are heavily weighted toward student progress because schools have more control over how much students grow in the K-12 school years than they do over, say, the percentage of residents with a doctorate degree. It also reports individual rankings for the other three metrics and provide data on average academic achievement, which is not part of the rankings formula but is still of interest. [This report was co-produced by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.]