There was a great website called NeighborhoodScout.com that lets you look at the entire country by various factors.  So I punched in "best public schools" for starters and looked at the various states.  While comparing test scores isn't the end-all way to determine if a school "good," this was a decent starting point.  Each state has it's own requirements as to what an "acceptable" level of education is.  What I liked about the NeighborhoodScout site was they attempted to calibrate the differing state requirements.  Another good site for schools is GreatSchools.org, but this site does more of an in-state rating (so a "10" in AL isn't the same as a "10" in CA) - not as useful when trying to compare states.

This starting filter let me get rid of a whole bunch of the warmer states that I would have assumed would have been full of rednecks anyway.  :-)  I pretty much used a 75% rating as a screen.  Again, not perfect, but I needed to narrow my search somehow.  FWIW, my current area got a 93.  So it let me concentrate on looking at a few southern states that seemed interesting to me.  And those states were California, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida and Texas.  As much as Mrs. Fly and I love Nevada, we had to cross it off (maybe later post).

California started off being my number one choice, but I couldn't find a house I "liked" for under a million, and it was probably going to be closer to two.  Um...  might as well just stay here.  And then you get taxed up the yin-yang, and being Asian it's going to be difficult getting into one of the top few dozen colleges from there (since there are a bajillion other smart Asians there).  Later post on my expectations for my kids' college.

Virgina was my second choice, since my in-laws live there and it's a pretty nice place to live.  But we couldn't find an area we liked.  Ditto for North Carolina.  Which left us with three cities in two states, which coincidentally were ZERO STATE TAX states.

Sorry again Raw Force, but it looks like my time is up for today...