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.

Dane County Elementary Schools Re-ranked

-The 2007 state testing data is out and I thought I'd take another look. Again I'm looking here at Dane County area schools only compared with each other and state-wide as well. The data you will see only includes non-poor students -- you can read more about why below.

Some Madison Elementary Schools are Tops

As you can see, Madison schools are simultaneously excellent and terrible. The top 8 are MMSD schools as are 6 of the bottom 10. Wow!

Not only does MMSD have top elementary schools in the area but the top 8 are above the 95% percentile statewide. That means those 8 schools are better (with respect to my measurements) than 95% of the other elementary schools in Wisconsin.

Furthermore, MMSD schools Lowell, Randall, and Van Hise are the #1, #2, and #3 elementary schools STATEWIDE. Yes you heard right. According to my ranking those are the 3 best elementary schools in the state for non-poor students.

Of the top 25 schools statewide, 7 are MMSD schools. No other area schools make the top 25.

You might consider moving to one of those attendance areas because these schools and the students in them are really, really good.

Other Madison Schools are the Pits

6 out of 10 of the worst area schools are also MMSD schools. WTF? These aren't poor kids scoring so badly either. I sliced and diced the data and couldn't find any demographic explanation for the bad scores. For those bad schools, no demographic group has a significantly higher score than the average shown (not white, asian, or black, kids, girls, boys, nothing). The only explanation can be that some of those schools are truly terrible.

How did I analyze the data?

The data are essentially the same as described in this post except for "Assumption 3". This time instead of selecting white student's data as a proxy for socio-economic class, I took a poster's advice and used data for students who are not "economically disadvantaged." You can read about what defines that here.

The reason I'm restricting to the non-poor is to compare apples-to-apples. Averages across all students don't really tell the story. It's sort of like saying that Medina, WA with a population of about 3,000 and the home of Bill Gates, has an average per-capita net worth of $19,000,000. That's sort of silly, right? Poor students are much more challenging to educate and thus skew averages for districts with no poor students higher.

So the short story can be seen in the table below. To explain the numbers, for example, Marquette Elementary in Madison had an average across all subject tests of 67.8% of its (non-poor) students test in the "Advanced" ranking. That 67.8% puts Marquette in the 98%-th percentile of elementary school state-wide. That is to say, Marquette has higher scores than 98% of all the other elementary schools in the state.

Where's my school?

You might notice your school not on this list. Waunakee, for example, does not report any data for poor versus non-poor students. Perhaps that's because no elementary school students qualify for free lunch? If you don't see your school on the list, they did not report the non-poor category of students.

Also, I've restricted my analysis to the following districts: Belleville, Cambridge, De Forest, Deerfield, Edgerton, Evansville, Madison, Marshall, McFarland, Middleton-Cross Plains, Monona Grove, Oregon, Stoughton, Sun Prarie, Verona, Waunakee, and Wisconsin Heights.

Elementary Schools

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

As you can see in the table below, Madison has some kickin' schools and some really dismal ones.

Table of Results

Below is a table of the results I obtained by ranking area elementary schools by advanced scoring percentages.

As you can see the range is pretty broad from 33.2% to 75.4%. The top school, Randall Elementary, had an average of 75.4% of students scoring in the Advanced range across the 5 tests administered. This is an excellent score. This score puts Randall below only two other elementary schools statewide. Keep in mind, this is out of about 550 elementary schools I analyzed – that’s really, really good.





Statewide color ranking explanation

I’ve made a color-coded column in each chart that represents the performance of the school relative to the state-wide performance of schools in its category. By relative performance, I mean its percentile rank. Here’s the key:


To explain, notice the schools with the red marker at the bottom? Those 4 schools are in the bottom 50% percentile in the state. That means they are worse than half the schools in the state. See the top 12 on the list that have a blue marker? Those 12 schools are in the top 10% of schools in the state.

My take on this is that it’s pretty important where, exactly, you live and which elementary school you go to. Madison has the best elementary school and the 6th from the bottom. So you can’t just say “Yeah Madison schools are excellent.” You can, however, say my particular school is excellent. Notice that of the 12 in the top 10%, 8 are Madison schools.

I think it’s fair to say you shouldn’t get all pumped up about moving to, say, Mount Horeb because, relatively speaking, it’s got a pretty poor elementary school according to my calculations.