If you’ve got a child in public school as young as third grade, you’re already starting to feel the testing frenzy. School administrators, teachers, and your child are all feeling the pressure to take and live up to state and national standards of learning. Those test results will be published in your local paper, appear on websites, and will be incorporated into every school rankings publication that exists.

What’s the Purpose of School rankings?

If you’re not familiar with the term, school rankings is the generic title give to any number of compilations of school assessments on the Internet, or in magazines and newspapers around the nation. Sometimes you’ll get a very specific set of school rankings, like Newsweek Magazine’s annual list of the best high schools in the country. Other times you’ll get a broader overview of the school demographics, test scores, ratios and facilities. The basic purpose of all of these is to help parents understand how well their child’s school is doing or to evaluate prospective new schools.

Test Scores and School rankings

How test scores impact school rankings depends on the specific assessment that it’s applied to. In a forum that attempts to compare schools across the nation, school rankings run into a very basic problem of apples and oranges. Because each state issues its own standardized test there’s no good way to compare a “B” rated school in Florida with a “B” rated school in New York State. For this reason test results for school rankings are a lot more useful when comparing schools at a local level.

Now throw private schools into the mix and your ability to decipher school rankings seems even more complicated. But here, you really just need to know what information you want. Some school rankings can be very useful for learning about the socio-economic status of a specific school. Another area I always recommend you check out in school ranking for k-12 gen interest is teacher turnover. This rate will tell you more about the overall climate of the school than any other.

Keep in mind that school rankings won’t always account for the special populations reported on the school’s testing. An inner city school that houses a magnet school may have high test scores for its magnet students, but a lower overall score because of the low-income neighborhood kids who attend. Sad- but a real factor of poverty that impacts school rankings k-12 gen interest.

You can use school rankings to help you evaluate schools in several ways. But just like any test the school gives your child, it’s one part of a bigger picture.




By: Patricia Hawke