What is the New Ranking System?

Iowa City High School “Needs Improvement,” according to the Iowa government.

Every year, the Iowa Department of Education Performance Profiles rate schools based on how well they meet a set of standards. But in 2024, the standards changed.

“They changed how they rank schools all of a sudden, without telling anybody, and it’s based on [random] data points,” City High school counselor Mary Peterson said. “That’s kind of weird. How does that reflect how good a school is?”

City High was “Commendable” in 2023, but went down two levels to “Needs Improvement” in November of 2024. However, it is still ranked within the top 10 in the state, according to the U.S. News and World Report.

The calculations behind each overall ranking are multifaceted.

Each school is given an “Index Score,” which is based on a variety of factors, including test participation, 

proficiency levels in core subjects, and attendance. The Index Score determines which of six rankings a school is given: “Exceptional,” “High Performing,” “Commendable,” “Acceptable,” “Needs Improvement,” and “Priority.” 

City High’s Index Score is 563.12 out of 900 points, or 62.57 percent. This would classify it as “Commendable” (between 60.95 percent and 69.59 percent), a category that includes schools between the 54th and 86th percentiles. 

However, the most significant change this year was the introduction of automatic category deductions if any subgroups didn’t reach 95 percent participation on the Iowa Statewide Assessment of Student Progress (ISASP). The new method of calculation also deducted one level if schools were identified as “Targeted.”

Because of this, City High’s overall rating dropped down two levels to “Needs Improvement,” between about the 14th and 32nd percentiles of all public schools in Iowa. The “Students with disabilities” subgroup met only 93 percent participation on the ISASPs. The school’s two targeted subgroups are “English Learners” (EL) and “Students with Disabilities” (IEP).

The explanation for City High’s rating drop on its Iowa Department of Education Performance Profile page reads: “Rating category was dropped by one for having at least one student group with less than 95% participation rate on state assessments,” and “Rating category was dropped by one due to the school being identified for Targeted status.” 

The Performance Profile website’s “Achievement Gaps” section explains the subgroup categorizations’ objectives.

“An important goal of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is to help improve the academic achievement of student groups. ESSA requires the reporting of student performance for all students as well as race/ethnic subgroups, English learners (EL), students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (low socio-economic status) and students with disabilities. An overall score (index) is created for each student group as well as detail about the performance of that subgroup across multiple measures. Subgroups must have 20 or more students to have an overall score for each measure. Targeted subgroups are those student groups below the same benchmark which is used to identify comprehensive schools,” it states.

A source at the Iowa Department of Education declined to comment but pointed towards the following information: 

According to the Department of Education, if a subgroup didn’t meet 95 percent participation last year, their Index Score score decreased by 10 of 100 points. Depending on what their Index Score was, this may or may not have dropped a school in ranking, and it had never dropped City High’s overall ranking before 2024. Schools’ Index Scores were not affected at all if they were “Targeted,”  which is a federal requirement. “Comprehensive” is another federally required designation. It uses the same distinction as “Targeted,” but is given to a school when all subgroups, not just one, are under the benchmark.

City High’s neighbors, West High School and Liberty High School, faced similar deductions. Each were both initially in the “Commendable” category but were dropped down a level to “Acceptable” because of “Targeted” status. 

City High’s Rating

According to the Iowa Department of Education, the rankings are used to determine which schools and subgroups need extra support. They are also used to “report to the community the academic proficiency of students in both the community and the state.” 

The Iowa Performance Profiles have existed since 2018. For the past four years, City High has been consistently ranked as “Commendable.” Since 2018, it has also been “Targeted” because not all subgroups meet a set of standards as required by the ESSA. In the past, as in this year, these subgroups have been “Students With Disabilities” and “English Language Learners.”

This Targeted Status requires City High to develop a plan of improvement for the subgroups that didn’t meet standards over the next two years. But because of the new system, school administrators didn’t know that being recognized as “Targeted” would automatically drop them down a level in the rating system. City High Principal John Bacon expressed frustration over the automatic deduction for subgroups participating below 95 percent on ISASPs.

“It was a moving target. We didn’t even know that was a thing at the time of the administration of the [ISASPs],” Bacon said. “I don’t want to say, ‘Had we known that [the rating system would change], we would have tried harder to get every single one to be over the line, because I don’t even know that we could have tried harder.”

Principal Bacon said that City High test administrators did their best to track down every single student they could to take the test. 

“We really seriously worked with every single student that we possibly could to make sure they had taken the test,” he said. “There were kids that simply were not able to take the test. So we did everything we could to hit that 95 percent, but through factors that we don’t control, we fell just decimal points short of that,” Bacon said.

Of the 259 tests (this is a composite number that includes all science, math, and language arts tests) that were supposed to be administered to students with disabilities, 241 were taken. That’s a 93.05 percent participation rate, just two percentage points short of the cutoff to be marked as “Targeted.” If just seven more tests had been taken, regardless of what subject they were in, “Students With Disabilities” would not be a targeted subgroup.

City High School might be disadvantaged in school rankings from the start because of its demographics. 

While much of Iowa is rural, Iowa City is not. Exactly 50 percent of all students in the ICCSD are white; the other half are racial minorities. This is vastly different from most other districts in Iowa–Solon Community School District, which neighbors Iowa City, is 93% white, and Pleasant Valley School District, another large district in Iowa, is 73% white. Naturally, having more racial groups creates more subgroups, because each group must have at least 20 students to be considered a subgroup.

Additionally, the Iowa City Community School District (ICCSD), with 14,550 students, is the third-largest district in the state of Iowa, just behind Des Moines and Cedar Rapids. More than 41% of its students are classified as having a low socioeconomic status. Just like the ICCSD, Cedar Rapids and Des Moines suffered in the new rating system–all Cedar Rapids high schools were rated as “Priority,” even lower than City High’s “Needs Improvement” rating, and all Des Moines high schools were labeled as “Priority” with a comprehensive distinction.

City High has 1,706 students and is the largest high school in the ICCSD. Its subgroups include all racial categories except for “Native American” and “Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.” Additionally, City High has subgroups for English Language Learners, low-socioeconomic students, and students with disabilities.

There are 2,200 English Language Learners from kindergarten through 12th grade in the District, making up about 15 percent of the total population. A hundred and one ELL teachers are listed on the ICCSD Staff Directory. In contrast, Pleasant Valley High School has six ELL teachers for the entire district. 

“You can be brand-new in America, hardly speaking any English at all, but by law, we have to give you the ISASP [Iowa Statewide Assessment of Student Progress] in English,” Bacon said.

Because City High and the ICCSD have a large English learning population, they may automatically be at a disadvantage in the state ratings despite having the resources necessary to help these students. 

“Smaller-town schools or less diverse communities that don’t have large ELL [English Language Learner] populations don’t get dinged because they don’t hit the threshold to count as a subgroup. So all the schools that have a sizable enough population to register as a subgroup are not likely to hit the achievement benchmarks that are necessary,” Bacon said.

There are eight schools in the Pleasant Valley School District and 28 schools in the ICCSD (counting Hills Elementary, which is no longer in operation as of this year). When accounting for the number of schools, the ICCSD has on average 3.6 ELL teachers per school, whereas the Pleasant Valley School District has only three-quarters of an ELL teacher per school. 

“When I was at [Cedar Rapids] Jefferson, we had six [ELL teachers] in my building,” Pleasant Valley principal Mike Hawley said. “So those things matter…we don’t have the [socioeconomic] variance that other schools have, and we have lots of people who are college-educated [whose] children come [to Pleasant Valley High School.]”

But, of course, that doesn’t mean that schools without as diverse a population as City High can slack off when it comes to the rating system.

“There’s all that, but we also work really, really hard,” Principal Hawley said. “When we were ‘Targeted,’ we got down and dirty and made sure that we were doing things to move our students with disabilities up out of there, but it’s a smaller group [than at City High], so it was a little easier to do that.”

High Schools Throughout Iowa

Solon High School, which has 489 students, is one school that was rated as “High-Performing” in 2024. Since 2018, the school has consistently been rated either “High-Performing” or “Commendable.”

“We’re really small, white, and Christian. I know everyone; everyone knows me,” an anonymous Solon student said about the school environment. “Our teachers actually care, though. They put way too much money and time into us.”

Solon is highly ranked because it has low chronic absenteeism rates; high state assessment participation in all of its qualifying subgroups; and high student proficiency in language arts, math, and science. High state assessment participation and chronic absenteeism are both categories that City High and other larger schools struggle with.

The factors the student mentioned appear to affect Solon’s ratings more than one might expect. Because 94% of the student population is white, Solon does not have the 20 students required to qualify for any race-based subgroups–other than “white”–that count towards its total score. 

In 2024, only one student at Solon did not take the ISASP. Since 100% of the white students took the ISASP, this student must not have been white. Since the number of students who are not white is so small–approximately fourteen students are multiracial, ten are Hispanic, two are Asian, and one is Black–counting any of these subcategories in the total score would indicate that particular subgroup is targeted because even one person not taking the ISASP creates a total percentage under 95%. 

The Solon student believes that the ratings accurately reflect Solon’s quality as a school. 

“I really do think it’s in the top 10 percent [of schools in Iowa],” they said. 

But others feel that the rating system is flawed. Principal Bacon expressed concern that because of subgroup deductions, the overall rankings might not reflect the true quality of the high school.

“I’m worried [that], in this headline-driven world, people aren’t going to take the time to understand the nuances or intricacies of this. . . they just see a headline that’ll say ‘[City High] Needs Improvement.’And that’s why it’s so hurtful,” Bacon said.

According to Mr. Bacon, City High has the largest special-education population in the ICCSD “by a wide margin.”

“We have almost twice as many IEP [students] as West does, and three or four times as many as Liberty. It’s wrong. It’s really wrong,” Bacon said. “Any school district that serves diverse populations gets dinged based on the way this is set up. . . We serve everybody. . . it should be celebrated.” 

The Iowa High School Sports Association splits high schools in Iowa into different classifications based on population size. The 36 biggest high schools are considered “5A,” the next 36 largest are “4A,” and so on. 

No 5A high schools were considered “High-Performing” or “Exceptional” by the Iowa Performance Profiles. Of Iowa’s 36 5A high schools, only one continues to be rated above “Acceptable.” This is Pleasant Valley High School, located in Scott County, an area where the majority of residents are white and of a higher socioeconomic status.

“We sit out on the east end [of the Quad Cities], so most of us are in Bettendorf. We also have LeClaire, an area that is growing, which means that in large parts, housing is fairly expensive,” Pleasant Valley principal Mike Hawley said. “You don’t have a lot of refugees moving into this part of the world.”

Because of Pleasant Valley’s student demographics, it is an outlier among large high schools. Cedar Rapids Jefferson High School, where Principal Hawley used to work, is more diverse and had more subgroups. Pleasant Valley, however, is more homogenous.

“Our largest minority population is Asian, but it is almost all Indian. . . academically, they do pretty well as a whole,” Hawley said. “But it is almost all Indian, and where that plays a role is academically, they do pretty well as a whole. I’m not going to say that all of them do, by no means, right, but as a whole, that group doesn’t get targeted. So we benefit as a school in that some of our populations do very well, and some of our populations [aren’t large enough] to even show up.”

Despite Pleasant Valley’s “High-Performing” ranking, Hawley still finds flaws within the new system, especially the new attendance metric.

“On face value, I think there’s some merit to it. I think we know we have to get students in the schools, or they’re not going to learn,” he said. “[But] I think smaller schools have an easier time tackling attendance than big schools. . . I think the attendance [metric] is detrimental to schools who deal with lower socioeconomic issues, with refugee issues.”

City High, at which 42.7% of students come from families with a low socioeconomic status, had a “Chronic Absenteeism” ranking over 11 points worse than the state average.

“If you think about a school where money is short, kids need to take care of [other] kids. We see that a lot,” Hawley said. “They need to stay home because they have to take care of their siblings. Well, they’re not going to school. Two-parent families who both work and send their kids to school [don’t have] the same issue.”

Iowa City West High School, which is the number one high school in Iowa according to U.S. News and World Report, dropped down one rating from “Commendable” to “Acceptable” in 2024.

“While no ranking system can fully capture a school’s quality, I believe U.S. News & World Report offers a more accurate reflection of overall performance,” West High Principal Mitch Gross said.

Like City High School, West High has also been marked as “Targeted” for one subgroup.

“Given Iowa’s recent track record when it comes to supporting public education, it is hard for me to respect the judgement and analysis of the Iowa Department of Education. Having said that, the Iowa Department of Education’s rankings still provide valuable insights,” Gross said. “For example, West has been identified as a targeted school for students with IEPs—an important designation that helps guide our decisions, particularly in shaping professional development to better support our students’ needs.”

Despite the City’s rating, Principal Bacon still believes that City High is an exceptional school.

“This is one of the most beautifully diverse high schools in the state of Iowa. We serve everybody here, and I am so proud of all of our students. And I think there are a number of ways that we can show the incredible growth and learning that is taking place with students across the board. And so to just look at individual statistics, and say that it’s not satisfactory growth from certain subgroups, I don’t think, tells the whole story,” Bacon said. 

School Counselor Mary Peterson expressed her opinion on the new rating system.

“I don’t usually pay attention to those things because I don’t think they really reflect how good a school is,” Peterson said. “I think [the way they calculate rankings] makes it seem like public schools are not good institutions. . . It is felt that urban schools are trying to be portrayed as not good educational options.”

Mitch Lingo, the director of the ICCSD school board and educational researcher at the University of Iowa pointed to a few reasons why community members might believe that the ratings are good or bad.

“Some people believe that [the change] is just to make the schools look worse. And I can’t say whether I agree with that or not, but that is one of the rumors that goes around about it,” Lingo said. “Others will point to the idea that [the ratings] push these schools into working harder with these students to get them to proficiency standards.”

Principal Bacon also critiqued the new standards, pointing at the significance of the City High community and other measures not considered by the Iowa Department of Education. 

“[What] I know [is] this: the great public schools in the state of Iowa represent the very fabric of this state. These are long-time institutions that bring great pride to communities across this state. This is certainly true with Iowa City High,” Bacon said. “I think any measure that provides a pretty critical outlook of a school based on certain statistics just does not tell the whole story.”

School Choice

Sasha Garver, who has two elementary and preschool aged children, moved from the Iowa City Coralville area to Pleasant Valley in 2022. Her decision was made in part because of school ratings, although not the DOE Performance Profiles.

“We did look at school ratings in the GreatSchools [program] that was embedded into the Zillow App when we were shopping for houses,” Garver said. “The year we were shopping, Forest Grove and Pleasant View Elementary were the number one and number two elementary schools in the district and maybe the state. That also directly impacted the housing prices–the homes in the PV zone were 100,000 to 300,000 dollars more than [in] Bettendorf.”

Garver and her family’s choice echoes what Mitch Lingo has noticed. In addition to being an educational researcher at the University of Iowa and director of the ICCSD School Board, he is also a parent with children around the same age as Garver’s.

“In my parenting circle, I hang out with parents that are making these choices for their children,” Lingo said. “They’re deciding, ‘Hey, do I want [my child] to go to private school? Do I want [them] to go to public school? If I’m in public school, do I want to use open enrollment?’”

These are all questions that parents seek answers to in order to find the best school for their children. The parents who Lingo talks with often utilize the Performance Profiles and other similar metrics, like Garver did with the GreatSchools ratings, when choosing where to send their children to school.

“I can tell it’s more anecdotal evidence of talking to. . . parents in the district. . . about when they’re trying to decide whether to do public school or not,” Lingo said. “They make a list of which [schools] are ranked the highest and which ones are ranked the lowest, and pick from there. Or they pick out a high school and then pick an elementary school from there.”

Because he is both a parent in the district and an administrator, Lingo wants to make sure that parents are aware of everything that the Performance Profiles are saying.

“I think the one point that I try to make whenever I talk about any of this rating system stuff or rating system issue is that public schools are the only ones that are on public record for this,” he said. “So if parents are trying to use this performance reporting profile to make [their] school choice, their information is always going to be incomplete.”

Even though private schools might be earning money from the state government through educational savings accounts, or “vouchers,” as they’re commonly known, they do not have to provide the same student data as public schools.

“That’s what frustrates me probably the most as a school board member–that parents can go and look at City High and then they have nothing to look at Hillcrest for, and they don’t have anything to look at Regina for,” Lingo said.

Since 2023, Iowa’s government has allocated funds for students to enroll at private schools under the Educational Savings Act. Although most school districts in Iowa have not seen a significant shift in student enrollment, this voucher program is still new, and its effects could take years to become clear.

“We don’t see [students leaving] as much because we’re a high performing school. [Often], students choose to either go homeschooled or private school [for grades] K-8 and then show up [at Pleasant Valley High School], or come here and do part-homeschool,” Principal Hawley said. “Our enrollment is down, the first time in a long time, in our elementaries, where our high school is still growing.”

Some are concerned that parents, after looking at Performance Profiles of local, lower-performing public schools, will choose to send their children to private schools instead. 

In the 2024-25 school year, the voucher system provided $7,826 to families who apply. 2025-2026 will be the first year that socioeconomic status is not taken into account when determining eligibility for the program, and may incentivize more parents to go forward with this option. 

“[Vouchers and the Performance Profiles are] totally related. . . imagine if you’re a person that looks at that ranking and you decide, ‘Well, I’m going to go to whatever private school or homeschool or online school, because [my children are] going to get a better education,’” Hawley said.

Hawley explained that school funding is contingent on student population: if students leave a district, the school and its district loses funding for those students. These schools then can’t provide as many programs for their students, further dissuading parents from sending their children to public schools. Districts must also plan to make cuts years in advance since enrollment is no longer guaranteed.

In many other states, private schools do not have the same standards and requirements as public schools do. Unlike public schools, they don’t have to allow every student in their region to attend. Additionally, they are not required to provide ELL or special education services, which can make it difficult for students who rely on those programs for support. However, the 2004 Iowa Individual with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) requires private schools to provide access to special education to students with disabilities.

But life will still go on at City High.

“I could not be more proud of the performance of this high school. This is one of the most high-performing high schools, not only in the state of Iowa, but in the United States. We have students who are soaring here, year after year after year; we are sending [great] numbers of graduates onto incredible post-secondary destinations. I think there are lots of ways to measure students’ success, and [that] it’s really important to get the whole picture of what that looks like,” Bacon said.

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