Best School Districts In Massachusetts For 2018: Niche

We just gave you the best schools and colleges in Massachusetts, and we're rounding out this burst of educational rankings with the top school districts. These rankings for the 2017-18 school year come from Niche.com, which also this week released its annual high school, middle school, and elementary rankings.

One cool thing about the school district rankings is each district has how many schools and students it contains. So our No. 1 school district in Massachusetts, Wellesley Public Schools, is shown to house nine schools and serve 5,067 students. Scroll down to see the top 25 school districts in the state. According to Niche, the best school district in the country is the Solon City School District in Solon, Ohio.

To arrive at these rankings, Niche looked at data from the U.S. Department of Education as well as test scores, college data and ratings collected from Niche users. The methodology for each category of ranking varied. (Click here for more information on how Niche calculates its rankings.)

Niche assigns a standardized score for each factor, which is then weighted before an overall score is calculated for each school district. The overall scores are again standardized and some districts are disqualified from receiving a final letter grade if there isn’t enough data. School districts are then ranked numerically and assigned grades.

You can see the Best Colleges, Best High Schools, Best Elementary Schools and Best Middle Schools in Massachusetts here.

According to Niche, these are the best school districts in Massachusetts:

(You can see the full list - and some of particular numbers - here.)

1. Wellesley Public Schools
2. Lexington Public Schools
3. Newton Public Schools
4. Westford Public Schools
5. Cambridge Public Schools
6. Belmont Public Schools
7. Weston Public Schools
8. Public Schools of Brookline
9. Wayland Public Schools
10. Acton-Boxborough Regional School District
11. Amherst-Pelham Regional School District
12. Needham Public Schools
13. Westborough Public Schools
14. Lenox Public Schools
15. Harvard Public Schools
16. Hopkinton Public Schools
17. Bedford Public Schools
18. Longmeadow Public Schools
19. Milton Public Schools
20. Westwood Public Schools
21. Nauset Public Schools
22. Marblehead Public Schools
23. Dover-Sherborn Regional School District
24. Sharon Public Schools
25. Winchester Public Schools

Niche’s data for its K-12 school district rankings comes from various sources including the U.S. Department of Education, the National Center for Education Statistics and the Civil Rights Data Collection. The rankings also rely on data that is self-reported by Niche users and schools. (Click here to learn more about where Niche’s data comes from.)

What do you think of the rankings? Let us know in the comments below.

Image via Shutterstock