For those who don’t know, Buffalo is 3/4 inch left on the lake shore, Scranton is closer to New Jersey, Syracuse is in middle upper New York, and I don’t know where Binghamton is because I always get it confused with Burlington, which is in Vermont, across Lake Champlain from NY.
As to the success of public education, I was once supervising 4 high school summer hires, who were supposed to be among the cream of the crop. My job was to have them cut out and file newspaper articles by category. One type of category was countries. All 4 thought Nicaragua was in the middle east. I think they were juniors or seniors.