US News & World Report for years now has ranked and sorted the nation’s public high schools, based on how students perform on state-required tests, graduation rates, and how well schools prepare students for college.
Now the media company has put out its first-ever rankings of K-8 public schools.
Kennedy Middle School was one of Natick’s K-8 schools ranked by US News & World ReportAccording to US & News Report’s website, “Scoring was almost entirely rooted in students’ performance on mathematics and reading/language arts State assessments.”
The Report sourced its data from numbers put out by the U.S. Department of Education from the 2018-2019 academic year, before COVID impacted education. Here’s a link to the methodology.
Here’s where US & News placed Natick among the 1,104 public elementary schools it ranked:
Memorial—79
Johnson—103
Brown—157
Lilja—331
Bennett-Hemenway—373
Ranked 1, 2, 3 in Massachusetts elementary schools
Martha Jones, Westwood,
Horace Mann, Melrose
Woodward Memorial, Southborough
Nearby elementary schools in the top 40:
Chickory, Dover, 7th
Fiske, Wellesley—15th
Loker, Wayland, 19th
Hardy, Wellesley—25th
Josiah Haynes, Sudbury, 26th
Woodland, Weston, 27th
Sprague, Wellesley—33rd
Schofield, Wellesley—35th
Middle school rankings
Wilson Middle School came in at 113, and Kennedy was slotted at 119 out of the 527 the Massachusetts public middle schools that were included in the rankings.
Prince in Princeton, Boston Latin, and Heath in Chestnut Hill got the 1, 2, and 3 slots, respectively.
Nearby middle schools that cracked the top 40 list—Pollard in Needham was ranked 8th; Charles E. Brown, Newton Centre was 14; Hopkinton Middle School was 17; and High Rock in Needham was 24.
Including “K” students kind of bothers us
We remember a casual conversation years ago with a kindergarten teacher on the subject of school rankings. “Well, there’s another reason I love teaching this age. They haven’t started ranking kindergarteners. Yet.”
Looks like “yet” has arrived.
We’re not sure where the best kindergarteners in all the land attend school. For now, US News & World keeps the elementary school comparisons on a state-by-state basis.
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