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The Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School Committee discussed the Boston Magazine high school rankings during their meeting on Wednesday evening. Sudbury Weekly questioned the accuracy of the data used by Boston Magazine in our first story about the rankings. This week, the superintendent of Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School confirmed that the data Boston Magazine used was flat-out wrong.
Superintendent Andrew Stephens sent a message to the school community on November 5, and confirmed that the data was inaccurate, while also explaining his views on rankings:
“You may be aware that the 2024 Boston Magazine Greater Boston School Ranking came out recently and that LS was listed at #36 for 2024 (vs. #9 for 2023). While I personally and professionally do not feel that rankings that have limited categories and push the comparison between districts come anywhere close to reflecting the arc of the educational experience for a student at LS over their 4 years here, I do understand that many people do pay attention to these types of reports. That said, if you examine this year’s rankings vs. last year’s rankings, you may notice that LS has impressive numbers and actually improved in a number of the metrics Boston Magazine utilizes that are higher than a number of schools that are further up the list. One area I believe impacted the rankings is tied to the percentage of teachers receiving an exemplary rating as part of the evaluation process. While a number of schools utilize the ‘Exemplary’ rating on the teacher evaluation rubric, LS and some other schools for years have not utilized this rating in the evaluation process. As that number is 0 in 2024, it is likely to have impacted our ranking directly. In fact, the 2023 and 2022 rankings have this percentage of ‘Exemplary’ ratings at 38.6%, which is erroneous. Further, the percentage of students attending college is inaccurately low and based on colleges voluntarily confirming student attendance to a clearinghouse. It is thus our belief that rankings like this are not indicative of all that we do here at LS and I hope this provides some context for you.”
Andrew Stephens, Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School Superintendent
The school committee was of a similar mind on rankings. They felt that it was unwise to spend much time discussing rankings at all, but felt it was worth informing Boston Magazine that their data was wrong. While members acknowledged that some members of the community might care about rankings, there seemed to be a consensus that the committee did not want the high school to change it’s overall approach in the school, or to teacher performance evaluations, just to chase rankings. (1:06:10)
Member Lucy Maulsby summed up the consensus position of the committee:
“But I don’t think we should be in the business of chasing our rankings. We should not be looking at all the surveys and analyzing all the data. Boston Magazine is particularly high-profile in our corner of the world and if we know they’re using information that’s inaccurate, we should let them know.”
1:24:00
