Great elementary and middle schools educate their students from all socioeconomic backgrounds with the goal of setting them up for success. In turn, their students develop the core competencies in state curricula to best prepare them for high school.
U.S. News’ updated rankings of public elementary and middle schools can help you determine the best local schools for your children.
The rankings use the same methodology for all included grade levels. For each state, schools were assessed on their shares of students who were proficient or above proficient in their mathematics and reading/language arts state assessments. Half of the formula assessed the scores themselves and the other half incorporated the test results in the context of socioeconomic demographics. In other words, the top-ranked schools are all high-achieving and have succeeded at educating all their students.
There is no national ranking – but there are distinct elementary and middle school rankings calculated at the state and district levels, as well as state rankings specific to charter and magnet schools.
U.S. News summed each school's standardized scores on the four ranking indicators. From these, a single zero to 100 overall score was computed for each school, depicting how well each school ranked within its state on a percentile basis. For example, a school with a score of 55.00 performed in the 55th percentile among all schools in its ranking, meaning 45% of the schools performed better than, and 55% of the schools didn’t perform as well as, that school.
Ranks were assigned in descending order of overall scores. Schools below the 25th percentile have their scores concealed and display the entire bottom quartile's ranking range. Those unranked were all public schools that either served special subgroups, had fewer than 20 students enrolled in the federal government dataset, had fewer than 30 test-takers in reading/language arts and math, or for which usable state assessment data could not be obtained. This means all private kindergarten through 12th grade schools on our website are unranked since they do not have state assessment data.
U.S. News’ K-12 directory lists 119,201 schools, including 96,911 public schools and 22,290 private schools. Among the 79,227 public schools with elementary and/or middle school grades, 62,683 (79%) were ranked in either the elementary or middle schools ranking. These include 4,606 schools ranked in both.
In total, 45,236 elementary schools were ranked and 22,053 middle schools were ranked. When combined with the 17,680 public high schools U.S. News ranked in 2023, U.S. News has assigned 84,969 state ranks across its elementary, middle and high schools rankings.
