Feeder elementary schools are outstanding. High school and middle school are just "good."

[Anonymous]

Help me understand why this would be? Looking to move to a place where school districts are town-based. The district we're considering has 5 elementary schools (K-6), a middle (7-8), and a high school (9-12). All of the elementary schools are OUTSTANDING and receive top marks in the state. The middle and high school aren't BAD by any means, they are still ranked well with comparatively good performance, but they're not at the level of the elementaries. Think: elementaries are 10/10 across the board while the MS and HS are like 6 or 7 out of 10.

Why would this be?

This is NOT a place with a culture of private schools, so it's not a situation where all of the "smart" kids are leaving the district after ES. There's a small number of little parochial K-8s that might send a handful of students each year to the high school, but otherwise they're not getting a huge dump of new kids at the MS or HS level. Barring some sort of far away relocation (not that common, it's not an overly transient area) if you go to elementary school in the district you almost certainly go to high school and middle school there; if you are at the middle or high school you almost certainly went to the elementaries.

Scratching my head!

[Anonymous]

Can you dig down to see why they are not receiving 10s (are there categories)? Is it academic? Is it school culture? Morale? Do MS students get to rank the school - maybe student opinion starts to bring down the rankings?

[Anonymous]

FYI, 7/10 is really good. You don't need to be basing your perception of a high school off of a 10/10 elementary school.

[Anonymous]

My guess is that there’s one or two bad elementary schools feeding into the high school.

I would look at the specific demographics for the high school test scores. If you’re white or Asian, look at how those kids do.

[Anonymous]

Mixed SES high schools can often have very good and dismal elementary schools rather than all ok or bad elementary schools

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My guess is that there’s one or two bad elementary schools feeding into the high school.

I would look at the specific demographics for the high school test scores. If you’re white or Asian, look at how those kids do.

The elementaries are all rated "Significantly Exceeds Expectations" (98.2, 93.1, 89.9, 88.5, 85.0) on the state report card, the middle and high school are both "Meets Expectations" (68.9 and 69.8 respectively)

5/5 Stars, Significantly Exceeds Expectations (8.9% of all schools statewide) - score of 83+
4/5 Stars, Exceeds Expectations (22.8% of all schools statewide) - scores 70-82.9
3/5 Stars, Meets Expectations (54.2% of all schools statewide) - scores 58-69.9
2/5 Stars, Meets Few Expectations (11.8% of all schools statewide) - scores 48-57.9
1/5 Stars, Fails to Meet Expectations (4.3% of all schools statewide) - scores 47.9 or below

It's not a very diverse area. There isn't enough data to separate out white and Asian students from their peers of other races.

[Anonymous]

So they are teaching/ learning material at the E schools but when the content gets harder, either the teaching or learning is lower compared to other schools.

[Anonymous]

Is there a selective high school?

I don't know if this is true where you live, but in DC, they only test the lower math classes-- Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II. The better math students take one or two of those classes in middle school so they're not being tested on it in high school. The result is a lower-performing group of students taking the standardized tests in math when they are in high school. It's a quirk of the data. If you have any similar weirdness in your town or state, you might have the data skewed in some way.

I would encourage you not to rely too heavily on ratings like GreatSchools. They do a poor job of handling this kind of subtlety.

[Anonymous]

I think it's a lot easier to run a "good" elementary school than it is to run a "good" high school. People expect more and the kids are a wider ability range and harder to deal with.

[Anonymous]

I don’t know a whole lot about the scoring system, but I know in my own kids’ district there have been ratings variations among schools and one of the explanations was: some of the grades are based on “improvement” metrics in various categories and/or scoring on certain criteria that not all of the schools have in large or equal numbers. For example items related to ESL learners, certain specific programs for students with special needs, certain socioeconomic or diversity factors, etc.

Essentially, our district said that the scoring system really is not all that great (certain criteria can sometimes make an outsized impact on the overall score) and also that the metrics and criteria often change year to year as well.

That is how our district explained some of this anyway. It was a few years ago though and can’t recall specifics. Was addressed at a school board meeting.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Is there a selective high school?

I don't know if this is true where you live, but in DC, they only test the lower math classes-- Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II. The better math students take one or two of those classes in middle school so they're not being tested on it in high school. The result is a lower-performing group of students taking the standardized tests in math when they are in high school. It's a quirk of the data. If you have any similar weirdness in your town or state, you might have the data skewed in some way.

I would encourage you not to rely too heavily on ratings like GreatSchools. They do a poor job of handling this kind of subtlety.

It’s not a selective high school and the scores are from the state’s report cards NOT GReatschools.

[Anonymous]

I would not get caught up in those ratings. We bought in to a 10/10 elementary, 10/10 MS and HS area and it's not a happy place.

My best friend lives in an UMC place that is not very diverse on the west coast and it sounds a lot like the area you describe. Elementary schools are 10/10 but the high schools are just 7/10 like you wrote. We looked into moving there and found that in our area the districts emphasize testing and high levels of math so the standardized math tests are high. The public high schools where best friend lives require kids to take more arts (2 years) and more humanities (4) classes. They have a different way of looking at success. People there are so much happier than where we are and the HS kids seem to have a really healthy lifestyle balancing school and activities. Many kids in our district in the DMV seem stressed and miserable.