Middle Schools in 2008

If you recall your middle school years, I think you know how critical that particular period is to your educational future. Well at least that's what I recall from the days of yore where your "track" was decided in middle school.

Even if that's no longer the case, in middle school you're forming your peer group that, most likely, you will be with through high school.

Long story short, Madison Metro has the best middle schools. As you can see in the table, the top 5 schools are MMSD.

If you look at the statewide data, you'll see that not only are Spring Harbor, O'Keeffe and Hamilton the top 3 in Madison, they are #3, #4 and #5 statewide. These public schools are bested only by the ALPs charter school in Oshkosh and Swallow Elementary in Hartland.

Not to deny Cherokee and Jefferson their due as #19 and #20 statewide of course.

Of course it's not all golden for the MMSD because the bottom 4 area schools are ALSO MMSD schools. In fact, Sherman is quite terrible sitting in the 10th percentile down there; 47th from the bottom statewide. About the only thing you can say is that it's better than some of the, no doubt, awful Milwaukee public schools.

I'm sure the MMSD digs into this all the time but I would really like to understand why theoretically similar demographics should result in wildly different scores. For example, the O'Keeffe and Sherman attendance areas are adjacent. Yet one is #4 statewide and the other #425 statewide.

Most of the schools appear to be fairly consistent year-to-year but it looks like Savanna Oaks in Verona dropped precipitously from #3 in the area to #12 in the area. I wonder why?

And despite the recent problems at Toki, it's doing a pretty good job still.

New data are here! New data are here!

I'm reminded of the scene in The Jerk where Steve Martin gets overly excited about finding his name in the new phone book.

Apparently I'm just as much of a dork about new school performance data but only half as coked up...

So the new data was finally released and I processed it through my spreadsheet thingy. You can see the data for Madison area elementary schools below.

Somewhere in this blog you can find my methodology but basically the idea is to compare apples to apples. In school terms, based on the available data, that's comparing children of similar economic backgrounds. To that end, I have selected only data from students that are non-economically disadvantaged.

The score figure listed is the average percent of students scoring "advanced" across all WKCE tests (math, reading, social studies, science, etc.). My intention is to rank schools by a single figure.

The percentile figure listed is the percent of schools across all of Wisconsin that the listed school is better than. For example, Falk Elementary has a better score than 81% of all other Wisconsin schools. The color is just to give you a visual picture of those percentiles.

It comes as no surprise compared to my previous analyses that Madison Metro has the best and worst schools.

I was curious to see how individual schools go up and down quite dramatically. I had analyzed this before in a previous post and the variability seems to continue.

Again take note that of the top 10 schools on this list, 8 are Madison Metro schools. Surprisingly, Nichols Elementary in Monona is up there. Movin' on up, to the eastside...

It's fun to note that not only is Van Hise in the 100%-th percentile, it is actually the #1 elementary school in Wisconsin based on my calculations. Randall Elementary comes in at #3 statewide. 7 of the top 25 elementary schools in Wisconsin are MMSD schools!

On the other hand, there are some SORRY performances by MMSD schools. Lindbergh being the worst waaaay down in the 14-th percentile. I'm a supporter of schools but when what should be the same group of students performs at #1 in Wisconsin in one school and #663 in another, the heat needs to come down somewhere. Really, would you have us believe that the Lindbergh students are uniquely that terrible? Some of it may fall on the parents but a 50% difference on test scores cannot be attributed to them alone.

I reiterate my statement that educational quality comes down to tiny geographic areas served by individual schools. Perhaps it's socio-economic to a large degree given the wealth differences that are also geographically based but who really knows...