The September issue of Boston Magazine ranks the top elementary schools in Boston and its suburbs. They also provide all the underlying data for 652 schools in eastern Massachusetts.
My advice is to disregard the straight rankings published in the magazine and focus instead on the overachieving rankings
you can find on the website. The straight rankings are seriously
biased towards, well, towards towns where they read Boston Magazine.
The overachieving rankings take median home price and tax rate (that
is, how much money the town takes in from property taxes) and then find
the schools where kids are scoring better than the tax revenues of
their town would predict. (Dr. Robert Gaudet of the UMASS Donahue
Institute found that most of the variation in school MCAS scores could
be explained by six socioeconomic variables obtained from census data.)
I’m surprised this ranking used median home price instead of average
income as I think that would have eliminated the towns where home
prices have shot up so much in the past few years that even the
people who own homes there couldn’t afford to buy there now.
Perhaps Boston Magazine didn’t want to be so obvious about their
bias toward wealthier towns.
Here is the formula used for the straight ranking:
Factor
analysis was used to group the variables and calculate the rankings.
Three factors were identified: The academic factor (50 percent of the
overall score) included the percent of students failing or needing
improvement on the MCAS tests in reading (3rd grade), English and math
(4th grade), and science and technology (5th grade). The
classroom/teacher environment factor (30 percent of the overall score)
included the absentee rate, suspensions, student/faculty ratio, and
percentage of teachers licensed in their discipline and percentage of
teachers rated as highly qualified. The costs/spending factor (20
percent of the overall score) included average teacher salary and
per-student spending.
50% of the rank was based
on how many kids struggle on the MCAS. Well, consider which kids
are most likely to be struggling in the early grades (or any grades for
that matter): kids for whom English is not their native language and
kids with special needs. Schools with the highest percentage of 3rd
graders earning Warning/Failing marks on the MCAS Reading exam are in
Boston, Lawrence and Lowell. And, surprise, where do you think the
highest concentrations of ESL kids are? Boston, Lawrence, and Lowell.
So school systems with a high percentage of ESL and special needs
students are likely to fare poorly in this ranking. A good example is
Watertown.
20% of the ranking is based on average teacher salary
and per-student spending. Now it would seem likely that if average
teacher salaries are high then the per pupil spending is going to be
high also. And since teacher salaries step up with each year of
experience, average teacher salaries are going to be high in school
systems with more experienced teachers. In fact if you do a
correlation analysis of those two factors you find that almost 7
out of 10 towns with high teacher salaries also have high per-pupil
spending.
If this ranking equates more experienced teachers
with a better school, that’s not always true. There are lots of great
highly experienced teachers out there who work constantly to learn new
subject matter and teaching techniques and tools and bring them into
their classrooms. There are also a lot of teachers who are nearing
retirement and are not inclined to be working to improve the way they
teach – the ones who are signing out the TV cart four days a week.
Most
of the towns with the highest per-pupil spending are also the
wealthier towns with schools that also appear in the top-100 rankings:
Top 10 towns for per-pupil spending
Lexington
Cambridge
Waltham
Lincoln
Weston
Boston
Watertown
Newton
Brookline
Bedford
Again
a notable exception is Watertown, which has no schools in the top-100
yet spends more per pupil than all but six towns in eastern
Massachusetts. Here’s the interesting data on education spending in Massachusetts
Massachusetts’s
progressive school-finance system, the product of reforms made in 1993,
begins by establishing a minimum per-pupil spending figure—the
foundation budget—that accords low-income children a premium of about
42 percent over that allotted other children. (According to “Quality
Counts 2005,” 23 state formulas have an adjustment for low income, but
most provide no more than a 25 percent premium.) State aid in
Massachusetts is targeted at districts that cannot meet the foundation
budget out of local funds, so the state’s education dollar is
concentrated on poor districts. Rich districts may choose to spend more
than their foundation budget out of locally generated funds, but on
average they still spend less than poor districts do.
Click here to see what Watertown spends and receives from the state.
There are a few possible explanations:
1) A high percentage of older teachers making higher salaries. Looking at the number of teachers retiring
in Watertown over the past couple years here and the number that will
be retiring in the coming few years this seems to make sense.
2)
High per-pupil spending often correlates with higher percentages of
ESL, low income and special needs students and Watertown has both.
From the state statistics, Watertown spends about two times more to
educate special needs students (less than the state average). The state
also assumes it costs about42 percent more to educate low-income children.
3)
Retirement health insurance costs are a major expense for school
systems. Schools with a high percentage of living retirees relative to
the number of students are going to have higher per-pupil spending. So,
growing communities where the number of students is increasing faster
than the number of retired teachers are likely to fare better in this
ranking. Towns with a stable or shrinking number of students, like
Watertown where enrollment has declined each year since 2000, are
likely to fare poorly.
30% of the ranking is a strange mix. It
factors in the number of discipline and attendance problems with the
student/faculty ratio and the quality of the teachers. I’m not sure how
these factors relate and how they have been combined. I can assume that
low discipline problems, a low absentee rate, a low student/faculty
ratio, and a high number of qualified teachers teaching what they
are trained in are all good.
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