Readers Weigh In On Woburn's School Ranking

After this week, one thing is clear. Woburn Patch readers are passionate about the city's school system.

Earlier this week we posted a story about how Boston Magazine ranked Woburn as the No. 113 school on its list of the Top 100 schools in the Greater Boston area.

The Patch article received nearly 50 comments from readers weighing in on the city's placement on the list. Here is a round up of some of those comments. If you still want your voice to be heard, you can give your opinion in the comments section below.

Juliane Watros: The problem with this list is its over emphasis on test scores. MCAS scores are more than half the criteria and test scores in general are 3/4 of the criteria. Nothing about ethnic diversity, ELL percentages, or information about city/town demographics as a whole. Test scores are not everything, especially when they mark student performance over a handful of days and using only paper and pencil methods of assessing.

garc2010: I agree our schools should be a priority, diversity and median income should not be an excuse for underachievement. That being said, Woburn is spending more per student than Winchester and Woburn has less students per classroom than Lexington..... It is time to hold the School Administration and Teachers accountable for their performance. I encourage the Mayor to exert as much force on the Administrators to solve this. Ineffective teachers and educational programs should be removed and replaced

IQ: Honestly this entire article is based on a pile of numbers that really have nothing concrete in common. If you actually look at it, there is no correlation of dollars spent to test scores, college attendance, or any other category that could help attribute quality of education to student achievement. This whole "study" is not a study at all. It's just a pile of numbers that have almost nothing in common. Maybe some of you parents want to blame the mayor, the unions, or the taxes, but if you have kids in school, you yourself are the first person who should take responsibility for their educations. I'm highly skeptical of their "methodology" of "consulting school websites" and having some statistician "formulate" the numbers into a completely incoherent table of crap. If you have kids in school you should be helping them learn as much as their teachers.

Mary Thomas: What does my income have to do with how the school is rated? If we (the tax payers of Woburn) are putting the same $ amount as other towns per student that is how it is measured, not what I make. If we look at apples to apples, we are not doing well at all.

Janet Levesque: I think we have good, dedicated, hardworking teachers. What has to change is a focus on things other than academics. I wonder what we spend on sports instead of academics? ... I know it is a cultural thing and high school sports have many benefits. But we need to take another look at a school's core mission and that is to educate. It makes me sad, not happy to see our school ranking at the bottom of these lists. Even if our scores stayed the same or improved a little bit, we are falling behind because all these other communities are improving and we are not. Family involvement has a lot to do with kids achievement and maybe we need an education program for parents to let them know what it takes to make kids successful in the classroom? We need to give our teachers a hand. They have been turned into parents, law enforcement officials, mediators, mental health counselors and babysitters. When do these poor people get to teach? Let's help them out.