School Rankings and Niche.com

Of the various school rankings, you often see Niche.com's cited on social media.  For their 2020 rankings of Best School Districts in New York (nb: they have many different versions of these lists), North Shore CSD came in at #35 out of 693 results.

So what's the difference between North Shore and some of our neighbors who ranked higher? Here are their Niche.com "report cards." All get an A+ in Academics (as with Teachers and College Prep). Why a range of 35 in the rankings?

How can this be? Look at their methodology. It's described here and and every one of these factors, to some extent, includes 'self-reported by Niche users', er,  data....where they appear to have very few data points given the number of surveys cited..

Niche.com is a commercial site running real estate ads. Want an alternative? This measure of student growth from Stanford shows North Shore outperforming many of these districts. This site ranks us second in Nassau County (only just squeezed out by Jericho). It's called School Digger and only uses test scores from NYSED.

Test Scores and Rankings

For those interested in school rankings and test scores, here's some interesting data.

Here are North Shore's most recent state testing results:

North Shore clearly outperforms the state average. But what about our neighboring districts?

Here are our math scores:

North Shore's proficiency of 89% compares well to our neighbors' 81, 88 and 82%.

On the ELA portion:

North Shore's proficiency is 82% and the neighbors are at 80, 85 and 78%.

According to Niche.com's 2020 rankings, these neighboring districts are the #1, #2 and #7 best school districts in New York state, respectively. Read more about their rankings here and check out some alternatives, too.

Research out of Stanford shows that this measure of student growth has North Shore outperforming many of these districts. Another rankings site lists North Shore as second in Nassau County (only just squeezed out by Jericho). It's called School Digger and only uses test scores from NYSED. Finally, here's another view of the Stanford data showing the students in the best districts in Nassau County learn 20% more each year than the national average -- and that's North Shore.

Test score data source: https://data.nysed.gov/lists.php?type=district
Niche.com's 2020 Best School Districts in NY: https://www.niche.com/k12/search/best-school-districts/s/new-york/

Niche Rankings Revisited

 Here are Niche's District Rankings in Nassau County as of today:

 

Truthfully, not much separates these districts and a review of their methodology will leave you wondering.

And every one of our schools is A+

 

 

 

Is Niche a good way to evaluate your school district? Probably not - read more in a previous post.