By Superintendent Jon Sills
The district is very proud of Boston Magazine’s recently published ranking of Massachusetts public school districts. Our number five ranking reflects the town’s strong commitment to education, the caring and commitment of our talented faculty and staff, and the maintenance of class size numbers conducive to serving an increasingly complex population.
Click here to view the Boston Magazine chart
The accomplishment is rendered all the more meaningful when additional data are factored in: specifically how Bedford’s demographics compare to other top performing districts. Bedford High School’s Hanscom students, who provide an enriching diversity that other small town’s cannot match, also pose the unique academic challenges of a large transient population. Bedford also has a significantly higher percentage of low income students (13.2%) than the other top ten districts, in most cases with two to three times as many; similarly, with 5.1% English Language Learners, Bedford’s percentage is exceeded only by Lexington, Newton and Westborough. To our knowledge, none of the other districts host a significant homeless population.
At the same time, Niche.com, a national research group connected to Carnegie Mellon University, has just ranked Bedford High School number 17 in Massachusetts and in the top 2% of public high schools nationally. While affirming that we are an excellent school system, the disparities between the Boston Magazine ranking and the Niche.com ranking remind us of the importance of interpreting these assessments and their differing methodologies as positive indicators rather than as hard science.
The complexities of public education cannot be captured by standardized test scores or aggregate class size averages that are impacted by the number of small classes required for special education instruction. The statistics also fail to capture comparative curricular content, the breadth of offerings or the degree of focus on higher order thinking skills not yet measured by MCAS assessments, or the ways in which the whole child’s social/emotional needs are being met. Were these factors taken into consideration, we think that Bedford would continue to rank among the Commonwealth’s best schools. But while the present rankings only assess a small slice of what we do, we are quite pleased for our students, our families and our educators for the recognition that we are afforded.
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