The Wisconsin state school data and how I used it

The data I analyzed consisted of the state standardized tests given to students in grades 4, 8 and 10. This covers elementary, middle and high schools so we can get a decent idea of the relative quality of the various school levels.
The tests have several sections (e.g. reading, math, science, etc.) and they do not provide raw scores. Instead they provide the percentage of students scoring in one of 4 groups:

• Minimal performance
• Basic
• Proficient
• Advanced

So for one school and one test, you’ll get something like:

	Math
	Minimal performance	7%
	Basic	23%
	Proficient	40%
	Advanced	30%

Assumptions

In order to make any sense of this mass of data, I had to make a bunch of assumptions and selections of the data that I considered important to me and people like me (including my friends who had the original question).


Assumption 1: The percent of students scoring in the Advanced score range represents the quality of a school.

First, just like in Lake Wobegone, everyone assumes their kids are above average and I’m no exception. I assume that my kids have the ability to be in the Advanced score range. The more kids a school has in the Advanced score range, the more likely my kids will be able to be in that range.

Second, this seems like a reasonable proxy for educational quality. If one school has 5% of its students scoring in the Advanced range and another has 35% in the Advanced range, which one do you think is better?

Assumption 2: The average of percentages of students scoring in the Advanced range over all tests for a particular grade represents the overall quality of a school.

Since there are 4-7 tests taken, I had to combine them somehow into one number. I chose to average across all the tests at a particular school the percent of students scoring in the Advanced score range.

One problem is obviously that a school could have a fantastic Math score and a dismal English score resulting in a reasonably good average. A second problem is that a statistician might have a problem with this averaging strategy – comments welcome if you’re a stats whiz.

I think, however, this reasonably combines the scores to obtain a single number for one school.

Assumption 3: We’re all white. NOTE FOR THE 2007 and later data, I used non-economically disadvantaged students rather than white.

I only collected and compared scores of white/Caucasian students. I did this for two reasons.

First, I was specifically concerned with my kids’ opportunities not yours. If you’re non-white, I’m sorry, you can try to figure this out yourself for your own demographic and you probably should. If they had more specific demographics that relate to educational performance, I would have used that as well (e.g. parents educational level, etc.) but they only provide race and gender. My reasoning is that if a school is good for my kids’ particular demographic then it’s good for their education.

My guess is that in this data set, race is actually a proxy for economic class which, I think, is probably a better predictor for academic achievement. So my guess is that these results apply to all races having a similar economic status to the average white Madisonian.

Second, I had a feeling that the well-known and unfortunate “achievement gap” between whites and minorities causes the statistics to be not comparable between schools with varying minority populations.

Clearly the achievement gap is a problem in schools with significant minority populations and needs to be addressed. I’m just not analyzing or addressing it here.

Introduction to my Comparison of Madison Area Schools

What is this blog?

This blog will contain my personal analysis of Dane County schools primarily based on the state testing data. The posts are really intended to be read sequentially, more or less. So far it's not really a stream-of-consciousness like a normal blog; rather it's more of a straightforward analysis.

Why bother with this?

Our friends recently mentioned that they were concerned with the Madison schools among other things and were thinking about moving to a small town like Lodi. Other people we know are putting their kids in private school. I thought that Madison schools might not be in the dismal situation that seems to be the conventional wisdom today but I couldn't say for sure.

I stumbled upon the State of Wisconsin web site that provides test scores for various grades for every school in Wisconsin and decided to conduct an analysis to see what I could discover about the various schools in the area. Should we move? Should they move? Should you be concerned about the schools? I attempt to answer these questions given numerous assumptions.

Summary of Results

Madison has the best schools in Dane county and among the best in all of Wisconsin.

But, and it’s a big BUT, you have to make sure you’re in the right one. Choose poorly and you get a relatively bad school.

Verona and Middleton also seem to have good schools comparable to the Madison ones. You still need to choose the best one by location but you won’t end up with bad one anywhere in either Verona or Middleton.
The trend in Madison’s elementary school test scores seems to be heading toward the middle rather maintaining high scores and increasing low ones.

Some area schools are relatively bad. Does that mean your kid won’t get a decent education there? No. What does it mean? I think it means that your kid will more likely have average scores than high scores. If you think your kid is going to be a hard-working average student, then it probably doesn’t matter where your child goes is my guess.