Schools ranked high

Jeff Marsden shared this email today –

Hi All,

This is just a follow up to my May email that explained the US News Rankings. Two other sets of rankings come out in the past couple of weeks that I thought I would share with you. It is great to see the hard work of our students and staff paying off.

Newsweek released their HS national rankings and by state. In 2015 Medfield High School was ranked 52nd in the country and #2 in Massachusetts. To put this ranking in perspective, Medfield HS was not ranked in 2012, was ranked #262 in 2013, and was ranked #106 in 2014.

Also, Boston Magazine released their 2015 rankings. Boston Magazine will either rank the district or just the HS. In 2015 they ranked the district 12th out of the top 50. In 2013 they ranked the district 37th out of the top 50. In 2014 they ranked the HS 11th up from 18th in 2012.

I never get too excited about the rankings, but its nice to know we are trending in the right direction.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,

Jeff

On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 5:30 PM, Jeffrey Marsden <jmarsden@email.medfield.net> wrote:

Hi All,

Just an FYI…The US News HS rankings came out today and it has caused issues statewide. They changed the methodology for this year and it has changed the rankings for many districts.

Medfield is ranked 6th in the State for college readiness. This is essentially the metric used for ranking High Schools and is one of the highest rankings ever in Medfield. Only Boston Latin (an exam school) and Hopkinton (also not given an overall ranking) are ahead of us. The others are charter schools. This is great news for our students and teachers.

Medfield is ranked 14th in the State for Math

Medfield is ranked 27th in the State for English

However, the change in methodology looks at the students deemed ” economically disadvantaged” by US News. That is 2% of our students or 4 kids in the grade level. The scores for our kids in this range did not make the threshold established by US News. Because of this they wont give us an overall ranking. This is frustrating knowing that last year we were a gold medal school and last June officials from AP contacted us because Medfield High School had the highest percentage of students in MA taking Advanced Placement Courses AND the highest average scores in MA on the exams.

Other districts that were not given overall rankings include:

Weston

Lincoln-Sudbury

Hopkinton

Holliston

Lynnfield

Natick

Hamilton -Wenham

Medway

Burlington

Pentucket

Algonquin

and many others typically ranked.

I just wanted you to have the info in case you are asked by residents. We let US News know to expect push back as many high performing districts in MA were not given overall rankings this year.

Thanks,

Jeff

—

Jeffrey J. Marsden, Ed.D

Superintendent

Medfield Public Schools