Looking for good public schools? Find a smallish to medium sized city with a medium to large sized university. Our little (20,000 pop.) town fits that description. According to recent data, over 13% of adults 25 and over in our town have a graduate degree. (Only 10 non-metro area communities in the country scored a higher percentage.) A lots of them are Ph.D.s. And a lot of them are parents. Parents with Ph.D.s (at least those I know) tend to be actively involved and demand quality education for their kids.
So out of curiosity I was looking at school data (2005-2006) for Illinois and found that in 6th grade math, our school is right around the level of the top 100 in Illinois. (I was counting individual schools, not district averages.) Just a few places down from some of the suburban Chicago magnet schools, and on par with some other districts with stellar reputations. How many schools with 6th grade classes in Illinois? A lot. I didn't count as it's hard to separate the individual schools from district averages. But it's certainly more than 1000.
How about HS ACT ranking? I may have miscounted when trying to separate individual high schools from district averages, but it looks like Macomb is no lower than about a tie for 70th out of Illinois (public) high schools. (We beat out Urbana, Charleston, and Edwardsville... all university towns like we are...though they also were high on the list.) Evanston, IL (I hear they have a university there) was just 3 places above us. In downstate Illinois, Macomb is one of the top few. The list is, of course, top heavy with Chicago prep schools and high property value suburbs. (In case you're curious, our district's average ACT score was 22.2 which is somewhere above the 63rd percentile nationally.)
It is nice that such data is available on the web. I've had such good experiences with our school so far, I just wanted to see how we rank. I wanted confirmation for my suspicion (based on more evidence than just my current residence...I've seen it in other places I've lived) that small to medium sized towns with medium to large universities do well. And I wanted to confirm that the good experiences we've had so far are indicative of what we might see as our kids go through the system.
It is certainly possible that part of the explanation is that children of parents with graduate degrees (like households where one or both parents are university professors, doctors, lawyers, etc.) get a lot of early education at home so they start reading before kindergarten. But in our district math scores rise from 3rd grade to 6th grade, so the school is providing some value added. So maybe there are positive externalities to this kind of clustering.
Maybe having a lot of Ph.D.s in town is a substitute for a large property tax base in determining school performance?
Leave a comment