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...