... but only rates as number 172 in the nation.
Cab Calloway ranks number 429.
AI DuPont ranks number 641.
Mount Pleasant ranks number 647.
Dover HS ranks number 874.
Concord HS ranks number 1,373.
That's it. Out of the top 1,500 high schools in the nation, Delaware only managed to place six schools: none in the top 100, one charter in the top 200, two in the top 500...
Yet Delaware public school expenditures per pupil are among the highest in the nation (usually ranking around sixth highest in the country), at over $11,600/student.
You have to ask yourself exactly what we are paying for.
Cab Calloway ranks number 429.
AI DuPont ranks number 641.
Mount Pleasant ranks number 647.
Dover HS ranks number 874.
Concord HS ranks number 1,373.
That's it. Out of the top 1,500 high schools in the nation, Delaware only managed to place six schools: none in the top 100, one charter in the top 200, two in the top 500...
Yet Delaware public school expenditures per pupil are among the highest in the nation (usually ranking around sixth highest in the country), at over $11,600/student.
You have to ask yourself exactly what we are paying for.
Comments
anonone
The lack of correlation between per pupil spending and student achievement in Delaware is a legitimate question to raise in light of these results.
One estimate I found was that there are 7393 public high schools in the US, so the top 1500 represent the top 20% of public high schools.
Therefore, 19% of Delaware public high schools are ranked in the top 20 percent nationwide.
anonone
"The lack of correlation between per pupil spending and student achievement in Delaware is a legitimate question to raise in light of these results."
It is a very legitimate question but it can only be answered if you have benchmarks to use for comparison.
In the analysis above, we have the same number of schools in the top 20% as one would expect to find if the distribution was totally random nationwide.
anonone
Thanks for doing the math, A1.
19% of our schools so ranked sounds pretty good to me. My statement would mean even more if I knew what the other 49 states could claim.
The only thing is that if we were doing better than average, we should probably have more than 6 schools in the top 20%. (That is why I mentioned that a random distribution would give us the same result.)
However, because we are only looking at 20% of the curve, we still can't say how well we are doing relative to the rest of the distribution (the other 80%).
For example, if the rest of our schools were in the top 50%, we could say we were doing better than average. If most were below, we'd have to say we were doing very poorly, in spite of having 19% in the top 20%.
It really comes down to seeing the whole picture (nationally and locally) before we can make definitive conclusions.
Make sense?
anonone
After cherry picking their students for academic excellence, the charter school of Wilmington's 170-something placement is rather disappointing, I think. Perhaps if they spent more money on educating the students, they would make the top 50 in the nation.