Magazine ranks MCE as top rural Michigan school

Bridge Magazine has ranked Mason County Eastern as the top rural school district in Michigan. The magazine recently announced its Academic State Champs and MCE was ranked sixth overall and first for rural.
The district was featured in today’s Muskegon Chronicle and on the Mlive.com website. See below for links.

Bridge Magazine, which partners with Mlive, and Public Sector Consultants created a value-added matrix to determine the rankings, putting an emphasis on socioeconomic factors. The goal of the scoring system was to compare student proficiency at the school district level on standardized tests, across grades and relative to socioeconomic status. In order to accomplish its goal, state standardized tests were used from grades 4, 8 and 11.

According to the magazine, the value-added matrix is a modification that looks at an actual performance of a school on a particular test in a particular grade and then compares those figures to a projected performance given socioeconomic status of the school or community. In other words, they skewed the test with the philosophy that children growing up in lower income areas tend to score lower on standardized tests.
As a result, MCE scored high on the list.

Muskegon Chronicle/Mlive article

Bridge Magazine article