My local high school recently was named the top high school in Iowa by Niche.com, a school and college ranking site.

Today the Iowa Department of Education issued its first-ever school report cards. Ames High School didn’t do as well this time, only managing an overall ranking of Commendable, which is the third-highest report card category. Here are the number of Iowa schools in each of the six possible report card categories:

For this first year, the Department of Education distributed schools along a normal curve. In future years, the point boundaries for the school report categories will be locked into place and schools will be able to move in and out of the categories. In other words, down the road it is possible that some report card categories may have few or no schools in them.

I downloaded the Department’s school report card data and combined them with its free lunch data. Free or reduced-price lunch percentages often are used as indicators of school poverty. Here is what the free lunch percentage distributions look like for each report card category:

Zero of the 34 Priority schools have less than 33% free lunch eligibility and 30 of the 34 (88%) have more than half of their students who are eligible. In contrast, 27 of the 35 Exceptional schools (77%) have less than 33% free lunch eligibility and only 3 of the 35 (9%) have more than half of their students who are eligible. Here are the median and average free lunch eligibility percentages for each report card category:

Here is the box plot for each school report card category:

Here’s a reminder on how to interpret a box plot:

Iowa’s school report card results mirror those of other states, which typically show strong negative relationships between overall school report card scores and school poverty levels. So we now have an Iowa school report card system that confirms what we already knew from the peer-reviewed research and from other locations, which is that schools with higher poverty levels tend to do less well on indicators of school success. Whether we will actually do anything about it remains an open question…

Please check over my data and see if I made any mistakes. Also see my copyright policy and feel free to use these data and images as you wish for your own projects!

• Excel file
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