Understanding School Rankings - Sarah Smith vs. High Point Elementary Schools
Today, we’re taking a deep dive into school rankings for two local public elementary schools: High Point Elementary and Sarah Smith Elementary. It’s important for families to understand their public options and how to read between the lines of school rankings and sub scores on popular school ranking sites such as Niche.com, GreatSchools.org, SchoolDigger, and more.
A Tale of 2 Open Houses…
We recently had the opportunity to visit both schools again this year. As is custom with Whitehead Learning Group’s approach to understanding the class profiles and improvements of private schools and colleges, we aim to do the same with our neighborhood public schools. This means we are in the classrooms and meeting with leadership teams of APS schools each and every year. Sarah Smith Elementary recently hosted us during an October Open House and we stopped in a Prospective Parent Tour at High Point Elementary just last week.
The Intermediate Campus of Sarah Smith Elementary School is just off of Wiecua Road and serves learners in grades 3-5.
In the heart of Buckhead (right off of Old Ivy Road), the Primary Campus of Sarah Smith Elementary serves early learners in Grades K-2.
We dropped in for Sarah Smith’s Open House earlier this month where we had the opportunity to hear directly from Principal Emily Boatright and peek into classrooms.
High Point Elementary has a single campus serving students in Grades K-5 and is situated on the corner of Northland Drive and Greenland Rd NE in Sandy Springs.
Sarah Smith’s welcome sign as families drive onto campus.
FAQ’s Surrounding School Rankings
While on the tours, we learned some of the FAQ’s surrounding school rankings coming from prospective families and parents of first-time kindergarten learners. We felt like this warranted a blog post to debunk some of the myths surrounding “bad test scores.” Rather, we want to equip parents with a broader understanding of the school ranking system and empower them to be detectives themselves as they read between the lines of school scores.
Below are just some of the questions we heard that are top of mind of parents who are researching their local public schools:
What do school rankings mean?
My neighborhood school is only rated a 5…but my neighbors love it. What gives?
My realtor told me to buy in this neighborhood because it’s in a “good school district.” What does that even mean?
Is there a big gap between schools that are ranked 8 and 9?
Should I just discredit all schools that are ranked below a 5?
How often are schools ranked?
Who actually ranks schools?
What’s the criteria of school rankings based on?
Can school rankings fluctuate? If I enroll my then-kindergartener for the 2020-2021 school year in a school that’s ranked a 9, what ensures that it will still be ranked highly by the time he/she leaves in 5th-grade?
Clearly, this is a controversial topic for parents—and it should be! So much of real estate and home location is determined and driven by school districts. My real estate friends tell me that all the time! Parents just want to be good consumers and understand their neighborhood school options. It’s important to unpack just what school rankings mean, data to skip, and how to interpret the importance of each data category as it relates to your specific situation.
Sarah Smith Elementary: A Deep Dive Into Curriculum Offerings
Sarah Smith Elementary School is an International Baccalaureate World school, a distinction shared with only 383 U.S. elementary schools. Graduates of Sarah Smith have the option to matriculate to Sutton Middle and North Atlanta High Schools (also IB World Schools), which would give students a unique progressive IB education in grades K-12.
Before we even elaborate on school rankings using Sarah Smith Elementary as an example, we wanted to highlight some of the unique curricular offerings implemented at Sarah Smith.
Math, Literacy, and Writing: How Students are Impacted By Changes
In the 2019-2020 school year, the curriculum coordination and leadership teams unveiled some changes in the fundamental track of the 3 R’s.
Math: An overhaul in the math curriculum across all grades has been unveiled this year. Most specifically, instruction is now mimicking the assessment-style questions on the Georgia Milestones. For example, classes are embracing the “Read, Draw, Write” solving approach where students are encouraged to strategize, plan, and act to tackle ag even math problem. Curriculum chairs and leadership teams believe that this approach offers a strong emphasis in building a conceptual understanding of problem-solving that goes beyond foundational number sense to understand the “why” behind mathematics.
Literacy: Literacy curriculum overhaul is also cross-disciplinary and targets specific intervention models in all grades K-5. The implementation of Fountas and Pinnell reading assessment models assess reading levels (comprehension and oral fluency) at three points throughout the school year—in September, January, and April. Focusing on both non-fiction and fiction texts, teachers are able to more accurately track oral fluency (including errors and self-corrections), reading speed, and main idea and higher order comprehension techniques including inferencing, sequencing, and tracking character and plot development in a given text. These results are then guiding teachers’ discretion of “good fit” books and reading levels, as embraced by the STAR Reading books and AR comprehension assessments.
Writing: The Learning Community in leaning into a more robust literacy and writing instructional approach across all grades. Common Core Georgia Performance Standards are guiding a deeper dive into teaching the study of writing—and focusing on three primary types of writing: Narrative, Opinion, and Informational.