High Schools in 2009

For high school rankings, not much is different from 2008 although there seems to have been a slight trend upward of all the area schools.

Middle Schools and Obama's Visit

Non-Economically Disadvantaged Comparison

With Obama's recent visit to Wright Middle School, it seems like an opportune time to post the statistics for area middle schools.

Despite the apparent success of Wright, I wouldn't identify it as a particularly great school based on the data. As usual these data are for non-economically disadvantaged 8th graders.

As you can see James Wright (James Wrt) falls quite low in the rankings although I guess it's not so terrible compared on a state-wide basis. 44th percentile statewide is no great shakes though.

The top few remain generally the same year to year but switch places slightly. The top 5 schools are all Madison metro. Low and behold, the bottom 4 are also Madison metro.

I think both O'Keefe Middle School and Hamilton should be called out specifically this year though. In state-wide rankings across all middle schools, Hamilton comes in at #3 and O'Keefe at #5. Those are darn good scores.

The chart is below.

Economically Disadvantaged Comparison

Not to be a jerk about it but if you compare economically disadvantaged students across these same middle schools, you don't see James Wright as a stellar performer there either.

The overall scores are pretty abysmal across the board but if you compare these using statewide percentiles, you can get some idea of the quality of these schools with regard to educating the poor.

Spring Harbor does a pretty impressive job with low income students. Spring Harbor is a magnet school so I'm guessing it tends to draw the more education-oriented students of all types.

At 16th percentile statewide, Wright is no miracle cure at this point. Maybe the education money from the feds will help.

Latest Madison-area elementary stats for 2009

I'm a bit late on the new data which arrived early this summer but here you can see some new charts for the 2009 (really the 2008 data released in 2009). Here you can see the local elementary schools and their rankings.

Looks like the top 10 remained mostly the same. Shorewood Elementary moved up, Van Hise moved down a little but not dramatically. Lowell inexplicably shot up from the 63rd percentile to the 98th percentile. And, yes, I double-checked and the data are accurate. Again 8 of the top 10 elementary schools are Madison Metro (MMSD) schools.

I would say though that all the schools falling into the 90th percentile state-wide are excellent though. Keep in mind that means those schools produce better students than 90% of the other schools in the state. That's pretty darn good.

MMSD has the dubious honor of having 9 of the 10 worst schools in the area though. And Allis coming in at the 5th percentile is tragically bad. I reiterate the fact that your school quality varies dramatically based on exactly where you live within a district.

School district performance over time

If you were wondering how a few of the districts seem to be performing over time, it seems there is no discernable trend. The chart below shows 10th grade average scores for school districts and as you can see, they bump up, they bump down but there's no obvious trend other than perhaps a general narrowing of the gaps between them.

2008 High School Rankings

You can basically just look at the chart below. West High is the perennial winner of this category though Memorial comes close.

I wouldn't say that the schools lower down are particularly terrible given that only 3 are below the 50th percentile statewide. However if given the choice, I would not have my kid attend Lafollette. Poor Fighting Bob - I don't think he would have approved of the abysmal state of that school.

Personally, I would like to see East HS move higher. I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be higher.