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.

Dane County Middle Schools 2007 Rankings

So you know when I say 2007 rankings, the test data is from 2006, right? Anyway again comparing only non-economically disadvantaged students, you can see 6 of the top 10 are Madison schools; both Verona schools are up in the top 10 as is Monona and Waunakee.

In general, I would say that the middle schools of the area seem to be doing pretty well. There are a couple duds way down at the bottom but you'll notice a lot fewer black circles than in my previous post on area elementary schools.

Of course I wouldn't say being in the 50th percentile statewide is any great accomplishment but, hey, at least it's not Whitehorse down in the 16th percentile there.

Something to take note of is that O'Keefe and Sherman have been merged. Some of Sherman's students are at O'Keefe and some at another school. I'm sure we can expect the excellent score of O'Keefe to descend precipitously as we average the 36.6 from Sherman with the 65.8 of O'Keefe to get, what, 51.2 dropping the best middle school down to 7th place or something.

You know the MMSD board really needs to be more aware of perception versus education. It is true that the goal is to educate all children highly. It is also true that that ain't gonna happen! One thing they can do something about is managing perceptions. Is it better to say, MMSD has the 6th best middle school in the state (non-poor, etc, etc) and a bad school? Or is it better to say MMSD has some above average middle schools? My thought is the prior. People demand excellence not above averageness.

Anyway again can anyone explain how Whitehorse can be so bad while O'Keefe can be so good?

High Schools

Madison has the same issues with high schools as with middle schools: the top 2 and #3 from the bottom. By the way Madison West is the #2 high school in the state out of 265 others. I suspect with the Madison high schools, you could average the feeder middle school scores and get a close relationship to the high school average. Clearly LaFollette is a problem.

The relatively dismal performance of Monona Grove HS is interesting – I would not have guessed that.

Middle Schools

Same methodology; shorter list! Here you can see Madison schools simultaneously thrashing the competition but also being incredibly bad. This is why you can’t just say “Oh the average MMSD score is so low – it must be a terrible school district.” Looky – the top 5 schools are Madison middle schools. 6 of the 9 in the top 10% are Madison middle schools.

Hamilton Middle school is 6th from the top among the 320 or so middle schools statewide. Again that’s pretty darn good. On the other hand, if your kids go to Wright or Whitehorse, you probably want to move or request an intra-district transfer if you can.