This November, U.S. News updated its 2024 Best Elementary and Middle School rankings, including 45,236 elementary schools and separately 22,053 middle schools. The public school rankings are calculated within each state and sorted by state and school district. We also produced separate statewide rankings specific to charter schools and magnet schools.
Like our annual Best High Schools rankings published in August, linear regressions were used to assess student performances in mathematics and reading in the context of demographics and their states. This is more meaningful than simply looking at test results to evaluate schools because this process resembles, to a degree, how education administrators and researchers consider school performance.
However, our rankings also assigned considerable weights for unadjusted scores, because parents value environments where most children arrive prepared to learn and teachers can provide a culture of enrichment.
These are purely academic rankings. This means that we examined only standardized, publicly available data that state governments are required by law to report annually to the U.S. Department of Education. Certainly, nonacademic factors also matter in evaluating schools, but in this space we are measuring what can be fairly measured, and the academic performance of their children’s schools are generally of high importance to families.
All public schools that had the necessary source data were ranked. In other words, whether a school was ranked or unranked was independent of academic quality but instead typically owed to size and state.
In contrast, private schools are not ranked because data on them was unavailable, although U.S. News maintained our directory data on them for informational use.
This edition incorporated state assessment data from 2020-2021 – the first school year that followed the disruption in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. U.S. News first published elementary and middle school rankings in 2021 using state assessment data from 2018-2019. In 2022, U.S. News did not update any of its elementary and middle school rankings because the 2019-2020 academic year had been so disrupted that assessment data was unavailable.
Sufficient student data was again unavailable to update rankings for California, Delaware, the District of Columbia, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington. For these states, the rankings published in 2021 relating to assessments taken during the 2018-2019 academic year remain. Despite this, U.S. News’ directory may display information as recent as 2021-2022 for schools’ characteristics and enrollment in all states.
Vermont schools for the first time had sufficient data to be ranked.
For more details on data collection and analysis, see the methodology. School officials with questions about the Best Elementary and Best Middle Schools rankings, data or methodology can email official@usnews.com.
