My family and I live in Queens and I’m currently researching what Middle School to put my kids in. My oldest is now finishing 4th grade so it’s become top of mind. I did what most parents would do and Googled “best middle school NYC” and found a bunch of school ranking sites. But if you dig into the rankings you’ll find they’re pretty skewed in how they rank and some don’t exactly explain how and why some schools are better.
So I did some digging on my own and found some data in the city and state’s Open Data projects. I wanted to find out what are the feeder schools for the top High Schools in NYC. Well, it turns out some of the best schools in NYC are “Specialized High Schools” which require a test; the SHSAT (Specialized High School Admissions Test). There’s a dataset for Specialized HS Offers by school for 2020–2021. Perfect.
Above the data that I gleaned from the dataset. I added a few columns for borough, neighborhood, percentage of school taking the test and percentage of test takers that received an offer. I believe the best indicator of success is the percentage of test takers that receive an offer so I sorted the table by that.
I believe this reveals the top middle schools in NYC for 2020–2021. There was a pandemic but I looked at the data from 2017–2018 of the same data and found that the schools and their placements are similar.
I only tagged schools from Queens because I’m only interested in keeping my kids in Queens for middle school and I wanted to check the performance of the schools in which we are zoned.
The formatted spreadsheet is shared here for the curious: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pp-hQb_IvWoJn-fe6RN4kE9U4aXagx3u/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=104953941650309765535&rtpof=true&sd=true
