The Show-Me Institute is a conservative group that focuses on statewide issues. They have just come out with a Missouri School Rankings program that is sorely needed. Schools mostly are judged by themselves or those with a vested interest in spinning a positive story upon their classroom successes or lack thereof. The Department of Secondary and Elementary Education has a ranking system, but it is so complicated that you’d have to have an advanced degree from an out of state institution to make heads or tails of the rankings; which may be the point.
Anyway, The Show Me Institute has come out with a ranking system that lets you compare apples to apples as much as possible and assigns a state rank and GPA to each district in the state. You can compare Platte County with schools that have similar demographics like Smithville or Kearney.
Schools are like doctors; nobody thinks they send their kids to a bad one. But an outsider’s point of view and ranking based on measurable statistics might be a good “look in the mirror” for some. Unfortunately, history tells me that it will only trot out the defenders of each school to explain the flaws of the rankings, instead of an introspective review of how they could do better.
Anyway, here are a few of the rankings for you to digest/argue about:
Platte County R-3 – 91st out of 516 – 2.40 GPA
Smithville- 60th out of 516 – 2.60 GPA
Park Hill – 172nd out of 516 – 2.20 GPA
Liberty – 118th out of 516 – 2.30 GPA
And in a small school sampling:
West Platte – 91st out of 516 – 2.40 GPA
North Platte – 118th out of 516 – 2.30 GPA
Mid Buchanan- 338th out of 516 – 1.80 GPA
You can find it at moschoolrankings.org
Yes, I’m going to tell you who was last. Nobody looks at a list of rankings and doesn’t check out who “lost.” Poor old Kingston got last place. 516th of 516. They had 0.00 GPA, which is really not very good. I had as 1.56 GPA my freshman year of college, but that was from alcohol poisoning.
Honestly, Kingston is basically a suburb of Polo, did we expect them to win this thing?
Richland R-1 is the winner, they took first place with a 3.70 GPA and 1st out of 516 districts. The highest “local” school that I saw was Blue Springs rolling in at 17th with a GPA of 3.00.
That alcohol poisoning story is not true. I had an attendance problem my first year of college at Northwest Missouri State University. I didn’t go. I was pulling in $3.55 per hour at Thomas Market and it seemed silly to pass up shifts to attend classes when I was raking in that kind of cash.
Anyway, turns out that was a poor choice and earned me a 5th year of college. Not everyone can say that.
Those rankings are based on data from the 2018-19 school year, so maybe your school got a lot better at educating during the pandemic. You can at least hang your hat on that till your kid graduates.
When announcing the new rankings, the Institute said in part, “We hope the information motivates educators and policymakers to focus on improving student performance and overall outcomes.”
Let me know if that “motivates” your local educators and policy makers.
(Guy Speckman can be reached at gspeckman@me.com or trying to get his first semester GPA erased from his permanent record)
