High Schools

Madison has the same issues with high schools as with middle schools: the top 2 and #3 from the bottom. By the way Madison West is the #2 high school in the state out of 265 others. I suspect with the Madison high schools, you could average the feeder middle school scores and get a close relationship to the high school average. Clearly LaFollette is a problem.

The relatively dismal performance of Monona Grove HS is interesting – I would not have guessed that.

Middle Schools

Same methodology; shorter list! Here you can see Madison schools simultaneously thrashing the competition but also being incredibly bad. This is why you can’t just say “Oh the average MMSD score is so low – it must be a terrible school district.” Looky – the top 5 schools are Madison middle schools. 6 of the 9 in the top 10% are Madison middle schools.

Hamilton Middle school is 6th from the top among the 320 or so middle schools statewide. Again that’s pretty darn good. On the other hand, if your kids go to Wright or Whitehorse, you probably want to move or request an intra-district transfer if you can.

Elementary Schools

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

As you can see in the table below, Madison has some kickin' schools and some really dismal ones.

Table of Results

Below is a table of the results I obtained by ranking area elementary schools by advanced scoring percentages.

As you can see the range is pretty broad from 33.2% to 75.4%. The top school, Randall Elementary, had an average of 75.4% of students scoring in the Advanced range across the 5 tests administered. This is an excellent score. This score puts Randall below only two other elementary schools statewide. Keep in mind, this is out of about 550 elementary schools I analyzed – that’s really, really good.





Statewide color ranking explanation

I’ve made a color-coded column in each chart that represents the performance of the school relative to the state-wide performance of schools in its category. By relative performance, I mean its percentile rank. Here’s the key:


To explain, notice the schools with the red marker at the bottom? Those 4 schools are in the bottom 50% percentile in the state. That means they are worse than half the schools in the state. See the top 12 on the list that have a blue marker? Those 12 schools are in the top 10% of schools in the state.

My take on this is that it’s pretty important where, exactly, you live and which elementary school you go to. Madison has the best elementary school and the 6th from the bottom. So you can’t just say “Yeah Madison schools are excellent.” You can, however, say my particular school is excellent. Notice that of the 12 in the top 10%, 8 are Madison schools.

I think it’s fair to say you shouldn’t get all pumped up about moving to, say, Mount Horeb because, relatively speaking, it’s got a pretty poor elementary school according to my calculations.