2011 Middle School Rankings

It's been a while since my last post but now that the 2011 testing has started, I thought I'd share the middle school rankings from the 2010 test data.

6 of the top 10 are Madison Metro; 4 of the bottom 10 are Madison Metro. What can you say about that? Who knows. There's almost a 15% difference in the number of students scoring advanced from the #1 to the #10 school though. That's pretty high.

The other thing I find interesting is the fact that the Core Knowledge charter school doesn't outperform the "regular" high performing MMSD middle schools. It is getting better though - in the 2008 data, the Core Knowledge kids were at 55%; now they're way up at 70.4%. Of course you have to be in a lottery to get into the Core Knowledge school (plus you have to live in Verona - not my suburban dream but to each his own). You can just move to one of the high performing attendance areas in the MMSD to get in there.

It's interesting to point out that Sherman is also moving up a bit. 37.8% is nothing to shout about but better than the 25% of 2008.

Madison Area Elementary School Performance Map

This data is directly from the previous post but displayed in a potentially more informative way.

What you are seeing below is a map of Madison-area elementary school boundaries colored by rank order where bright green = best and bright red = worst.

Rank order is a little misleading in some ways. It somewhat artificially creates visual differences based on sometimes small statistical differences. On the other hand it's pretty interesting and informative especially where dramatic color differences border each other.

There are several schools not displayed on here you may notice. Two in Middleton and Waunakee have no data that differentiates economically vs. non-economically disadvantaged students.

If you have boundary maps for Monona Grove or McFarland, post or email a link because I couldn't find any maps for them to code.

Click a region to show a pop-up with detailed elementary school information.

Madison Elementary School Boundaries
Displayed in Rank Colored Order
Color key: Green is best, Yellow is better, Orange is OK, Red is worst

2011 Elementary School Rankings

Well really these are based on 2010 data but posting for 2011.

I had a brief scare having to do with differences between the data I present and what you might hand calculate from the DPI web site. The per-school scores of previous posts are correct. The aggregated data for districts is incorrect due to an error on my part. I will be re-examining the aggregated district data at a later point.

For now, you can see how our area elementary schools scored on their 2010 tests.

I am impressed again that 8 of the top 10 elementary schools are Madison Metro. Not only that but all of the top 6 are Madison Metro. I'm further pleased to note that my personal favorite, Marquette Elementary has moved up quite a bit to spot #3 in the local roundup!

A good elementary-level education has been shown to affect the rest of a child's life. The data again illustrate the importanct of particular schools and very specific local areas. Again, these are not economically disadvantaged students. Performance between schools of these students should be similar but it unfortunately is not.

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.