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Rankings are part of the overall picture, and while they should definitely not be the only thing you base your choice of areas on, you most definitely should take something based on actual data over a few anecdotes from people on this website with an agenda...ie, a house to sell in a poor performing district, or a delusional team sports like compulsion to tell you how great the area they live in is.
Thanks for the ranking again! I think it is pretty good to have this kind of general overview.
And I'm glad to see Mineola climbing a lot in the list from 2012 to 2013. I wonder how volatile is the list year after year after year.... I guess we'll figure it out in several years if Pequaman keeps doing it.
Also, nice to see a general improvement in the island as a whole. In the end, it is not who's first and who's last, because even if every SD had marks between 99 and 100 there would still be a first and a last. The key to me is to see if the overall mean is going upwards. They greatest thing would be if that is also accompanied with a reduction in the standard deviation, meaning that the bottom of the list is improving and differences between top and bottom gets smaller while total grade keeps improving... but I haven't done the maths to check that. At least the mean IS going up slightly in the island.
2013 2012
77.23 - NASSAU COUNTY 76.5 - NASSAU COUNTY
74.09 - LONG ISLAND 73.8 - LONG ISLAND
71.11 - SUFFOLK COUNTY 71.2 - SUFFOLK COUNTY
61.00 - NEW YORK STATE 58.7 - NEW YORK STATE
This is due to tenure. Once teachers get tenure a lot of them think they can just stop caring. I personally think tenure should be done away with. Do away with it and watch the quality of our teachers rise.
This would only make sense if the schools that are low on the list granted their professors tenure, while the top schools on the list didn't offer it. However, that's not the case.
If you'd like to identify factors that are defining of the two groups (schools high on the list vs. schools low on the list), I'd look at household income or racial composition.
I agree with the above reply. You can also look at average educational attainment of a given area (which is usually correlated with household income). When the majority of students come from parents who have college education, the bar is usually set much higher.
I know lots of lower-income parents and a surprisingly high amount of them just set the bar at graduating High School and staying out of trouble.
Look at how this list was created. The percentage of students attending a 4-year school and overall high academic performance (with the hopes of attending a good college) are huge components of the list. A student with parents with no college education is far less likely to be pushed to their full potential.
It's a huge list in raw data form. If you can figure out how to navigate it (not hard, use 'CONTROL+F' on your keyboard to search), it may be of use.
interesting... one side of town gets a school ranked in the 80s and the other side of town gets one ranked in the 200s. You'd think that's not too bad considering there's over 2000 in the list, but the one ranked in the 80s has a math score of 97 while the one ranked in the 200s has low 80s. English remains similar. Time to focus more on math for the little ones.
..and when I lived in Connetquot SD, Oakdale thought it was higher and mightier than Ronkonkoma and blamed the Ronk for bringing the district down from it's lofty aspirations. No joke.
Yes when I lived on the Oakdale/bohemia border and they use to call it Roncompton (as in Compton, the gang area in LA).
I tend to agree but school taxes are so insane here that I think people can be more obsessed over them because they want value for their money. As an example I currently live in a district that has very high school taxes because there is very little business tax revenue so the homeowners have to pick up the slack. But they have mediocre rankings so it bothers me that we pay more but aren't seeing a return on investment.
I tend to agree but school taxes are so insane here that I think people can be more obsessed over them because they want value for their money. As an example I currently live in a district that has very high school taxes because there is very little business tax revenue so the homeowners have to pick up the slack. But they have mediocre rankings so it bothers me that we pay more but aren't seeing a return on investment.
By and large there is not a large difference in teacher salaries from district to district on LI. Sure some may average 5-10K higher for a given year/step/credit level and that adds up, but for the most part taxes are pretty high everywhere because of this, and there isn't a huge a swing as you'd think between someplace like Central Islip and Setauket, for example.
A teacher near retiring in CI is making around 120K, a teacher in Ward Melville is probably right around the same thing, maybe a bit more. That money's coming from homeowners and businesses. Less bussinesses, bigger burden on homeowners.
I agree, I guess that's what I'm saying: If I can pay around the same taxes and be in a better performing school, why stick it out in the under performing district? Which is part of the reason why we are moving into a better district in June.
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