Why Nicolet Doesn't Make Milwaukee Magazine's Best Public Schools List

In the March issue of Milwaukee Magazine, the publication examined and then ranked 33 public K-12 school districts in the Milwaukee area. While other North Shore districts such as Whitefish Bay and Shorewood ranked high, the — which was awarded a Blue Ribbon of Excellence by the Department of Education — didn't even make the list.

The reason is the same reason Nicolet has been excluded from many other school rankings — it's not a K-12 district. 

"In our rankings, we didn’t include union high school districts, those that include only high school grades and not a full K-12 system," said Milwaukee Magazine Associate Editor Matt Hrodey. "This left out Nicolet, Arrowhead and Union Grove in Racine County. All the other districts ranked were full K-12 or K-8 districts."

Being only a high school district has excluded Nicolet from other large school-ranking systems, including well-known publications such as the study done by U.S. News on the Best High Schools in America. And Nicolet District Administrator Rick Monroe said just because Nicolet is not a K-12 district doesn't mean it should be excluded.

"Nicolet should have been included in Milwaukee Magazine's listing of top
area high schools," Monroe said. "The fact that they excluded union districts from their study and therefore did not include Nicolet was unfortunate and
inexcusable."

And residents agree. Kristen Ricigliano lives in Fox Point and has three children. She says Nicolet should have been included.

"It takes away from the relevance of the article when not all area schools are included," she said. "At the very least there should have been a clear explanation at the beginning of the piece as to why certain schools were excluded."

However, Hrodey's went a bit deeper explaining why union high school districts can complicate a study like this.

"Union high school districts present a couple wrinkles with respect to data," Hrodey said. "One of these is that students are only in the district a little more than a year when they take the WKCE in the fall of 10th grade."

For 2011-12, Nicolet's 10th-graders performed slightly better in the WKCE — Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Exam) — than in previous years. The number of students categorized as "advanced" or "proficient" climed to 89.3 percent in reading and 84.7 percent in math, the best figures in the last five years. Scores in other subjects such as science and social studies varied in improvement and decline.

Nicolet's enrollment is largely supplied by students from K-8 districts Glendale-River Hills, Fox Point-Bayside and Maple Dale-Indian Hills. The magazine did also examine the K-8 districts though not with the same top-to-bottom ranking as for the K-12 districts. Glendale-River Hills was labeled as an Underperforming district based on "the close relationship between poverty and student achievement seen in area test scores and ranked districts based on whether they beat or trailed the trend," according to the magazine.