Niche has released its annual school rankings for 2023. This year’s list shows that 7 of the top 10 public high schools in Tennessee are located in the mid-state region. Nashville’s Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet School holds the top spot, closely followed by Williamson County’s Ravenwood and Rutherford County’s Central Magnet. It isn’t until the 7th slot that a high school outside middle Tennessee is recognized – Knox County’s Farragut High School.
The middle school rankings tell a similar story. Once again, 7 out of the top 10 schools are located in the state’s central region. The top public middle school, per Niche, is Rutherford County’s Central Magnet (a 6 – 12 school), followed by Merroll Hyde Magnet School (a k – 12 school) in Sumner County and Thompson Station Middle School in Williamson County. Coulter Grove Intermediate School is the highest-ranked middle school located outside of Middle Tennessee. The Maryville City School is ranked 5th.
When it comes to public elementary schools, Sumner, and Williamson Counties lead the pack with Merroll Hyde Magnet School, and Jordan Elementary School ranked 1 and 2 respectively. Germantown School District’s Farmington Elementary School rounds out the top 3.
With unique profiles on every school in America, and over 140 million reviews and ratings from which to draw, Niche is considered a leader in school market research. In compiling their school rankings they employ data from multiple sources, including, but not limited to, the US Department of Education and parent/student surveys. While Niche uses an extensive array of data to establish its rankings, they are not without detractors.
Critics argue that Niche, and other school rating services, tend to favor wealthier whiter schools. In an effort to counter that argument, and to develop a deeper picture than that offered by existing research platforms, Stanford professor Sean Reardon created the interactive Stanford Education Data Archive. The archive incorporates more than 350 million test scores from every single public school serving grades 3-8 in America. Parents can see how their school and district perform on tests, and student pace of learning over time, compared to other schools and districts.
It is worth noting that when analyzing test scores tend to reflect more than students’ abilities or the quality of a school, including support at home, early childhood opportunities from care to preschools, after-school programs, and what’s available in the neighborhood.
Using the data from the Archive, Reardon and a team of researchers have published various papers, including a new one that argues that school poverty – and not the racial composition of schools is the strongest indicator of achievement gaps.
“While racial segregation is important, it’s not the race of one’s classmates that matters, per se,” said Reardon. “It’s the fact that in America today, racial segregation brings with it very unequal concentrations of students in high- and low-poverty schools.”
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TC Weber is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. He also writes the blog Dad Gone Wild. Follow TC on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected]. He’s the proud parent of two public school children and the spouse of a public school teacher.
Photo “Students” by Tima Miroshnichenko.
