High Schools

Put that in your Pipe and Smoke It

For those folks so enamored of the various suburban "great schools" you should make sure you look at the facts. Specifically, I'm pretty amazed at the relatively poor performance of Waunakee HS. It's down in the 66th percentile statewide. That's not terrible but it's not a super-dooper school either. Contrast it with West HS which is in the 99th percentile statewide and, in fact, the 4th best high school in Wisconsin (according to my analysis, etc, etc)

Anyway for the most part, the high schools do pretty well. I would say anything above 80th percentile statewide is pretty good. Who knew that Wisconsin Heights HS was so good? I don't even know where it is! It got on this list because the district was in the area. It probably helps that they only have something like 95 students in 10th grade.

Amazing Facts

So what's kind of interesting to me is the high performance of Sun Prairie High School compared with the middling (at best) performance of students in Sun Prairie middle schools. Their two middle schools I have data for were hanging around at about 60th percentile statewide for 8th grade tests.

Then BOOM! the students get smart 2 grades later and push their high school scores to 92nd percentile. Of course this is a snapshot so the student groups are different. So perhaps the bad 8th grade scores we see will translate to bad 10th grade scores in 2 years. Or perhaps Sun Prairie HS is really, really good at educating.