Civic Report 51 | What’s in a Name? The Decline in The Civic Mission of School Names
# Of almost 3,000 public schools in Florida, five honor George Washington, compared with eleven named after manatees.
# In Minnesota, the naming of schools after presidents declined from 14 percent of schools built before 1956 to 3 percent of schools built in the last decade.
# In New Jersey, naming schools after people dropped from 45 percent of schools built before 1948 to 27 percent of schools built since 1988.
# In the last two decades, a public school built in Arizona was almost fifty times more likely to be named after such things as a mesa or a cactus than after a president.
# In Florida, nature names for schools increased from 19 percent of schools built before 1958 to 37 percent of schools built in the last decade.
# Similar patterns were observed in all seven states analyzed.
# Today, a majority of all public school districts nationwide do not have a single school named after a president.
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