Madison City Schools
Wisconsin's public schools top all kinds of national best-of lists, and the schools in the suburbs that surround Madison are among the reasons our state has a reputation for quality education.
By Mary Feingold
The accompanying chart shows how our suburbs rank in comparison to one another, based solely on the success of their community schools. All schools scored so well in virtually every category considered for this rating that a caveat is needed: While the chart reflects that the Waunakee schools came up with the best overall score, the schools or school districts that ranked lower, such as Maple Bluff, still scored well above average.
Education is increasingly a game of numbers, so we made sure to look at a variety of statistics when we analyzed how the schools in our suburbs compare to one another. Happily, the state's Department of Public Instruction gathers an astonishing amount of information on schools, much of it numerical. So that's where we went, taking our numbers from the DPI's most recent school performance report.
When deciding which statistics would tell the most truthful story about how suburban schools stack up, we looked to our survey. School safety and class size popped up there as concerns, so we included statistics on student-to-teacher ratios and on the number of times students at a given high school were suspended or expelled for transgressions that involved either drugs or weapons. Respondents cared about test scores, too, so we included plenty of those; third-grade reading scores are broken down by school district, as are the results of the statewide knowledge and comprehension exams that are given to students in the 4th, 8th and 10th grades. ACT test scores and high school graduation and dropout rates round out our criteria. And we threw in the overall size of each school district for the sake of comparison, although it is a category that does not figure into each school's overall ranking. Then we gave our data to the Data Population Lab at UW-Madison. They standardized all the numbers, applied the weights taken from the survey, and determined an overall ranking for each suburb's school district.
A couple of notes: Very few of the incidents that the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction classifies as "weapon- or drug-related" did, in fact, have anything to do with weapons. Instead, they had to do with drugs and with one drug in particular. That is, many of the drug-related incidents involved illegalities related to alcohol. Also in need of clarification is the fact that some communities are served by more than one school district. In those cases, the data reflect a combination of the relevant elementary, middle and high school scores.
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By Mary Feingold
The accompanying chart shows how our suburbs rank in comparison to one another, based solely on the success of their community schools. All schools scored so well in virtually every category considered for this rating that a caveat is needed: While the chart reflects that the Waunakee schools came up with the best overall score, the schools or school districts that ranked lower, such as Maple Bluff, still scored well above average.
Education is increasingly a game of numbers, so we made sure to look at a variety of statistics when we analyzed how the schools in our suburbs compare to one another. Happily, the state's Department of Public Instruction gathers an astonishing amount of information on schools, much of it numerical. So that's where we went, taking our numbers from the DPI's most recent school performance report.
When deciding which statistics would tell the most truthful story about how suburban schools stack up, we looked to our survey. School safety and class size popped up there as concerns, so we included statistics on student-to-teacher ratios and on the number of times students at a given high school were suspended or expelled for transgressions that involved either drugs or weapons. Respondents cared about test scores, too, so we included plenty of those; third-grade reading scores are broken down by school district, as are the results of the statewide knowledge and comprehension exams that are given to students in the 4th, 8th and 10th grades. ACT test scores and high school graduation and dropout rates round out our criteria. And we threw in the overall size of each school district for the sake of comparison, although it is a category that does not figure into each school's overall ranking. Then we gave our data to the Data Population Lab at UW-Madison. They standardized all the numbers, applied the weights taken from the survey, and determined an overall ranking for each suburb's school district.
A couple of notes: Very few of the incidents that the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction classifies as "weapon- or drug-related" did, in fact, have anything to do with weapons. Instead, they had to do with drugs and with one drug in particular. That is, many of the drug-related incidents involved illegalities related to alcohol. Also in need of clarification is the fact that some communities are served by more than one school district. In those cases, the data reflect a combination of the relevant elementary, middle and high school scores.
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