Thursday, December 11, 2008
by The Hat Team
Montgomery Schools Among Best In Nation
Schools are an important decision when buying a home…even if you don’t have children. We all want the best education for our children. But schools also affect home values. If you put the same home in two different school districts, the home with the better schools is usually valued higher and will appreciate faster. Home buyers often think schools are better in outlying suburbs than in a city, but this is not the case in Montgomery.
Those of us who live in Montgomery are proud of, but not surprised by the gold Medal ranking as LAMP routinely produces state National Merit Scholarship winners, and its graduates win millions in scholarship money from some of the best colleges in the nation.
Bronze Medalists
We can are also proud of the three additional Montgomery high schools that are Bronze Medal winners: Carver High, Brewbaker Technology High, and Booker T. Washington High. A Bronze award places these schools among the top 1,900 public schools in the country.
Also designated as Bronze Medal Schools were Autaugaville and Billingsley high schools in Autauga County, AL.
21,000 public high schools were considered to determine its winners and fifty-four Alabama public high schools were ranked by U.S. News.
Three Alabama Silver Medalists include Mountain Brook High School, Vestavia Hills High, and Virgil Grissom High in Huntsville, as well as 50 Bronze Medal schools.
Academic and enrollment data were analyzed in a three-step process. The first step determined whether each school's students were performing better than statistically expected for the average student in the state. The second step determined whether the school's least-advantaged students were performing better than average for similar students in the state. Schools that did well on these first two steps were awarded Bronze Medals.
According to the Alabama Department of Education, schools that passed the first two steps became eligible for judging on the final step - college-readiness performance based on Advanced Placement and/or International Baccalaureate test data.
Gold Medals went to the Top 100 high schools nationally with the highest college readiness index scores, Silver Medals to the next 504 high schools, and Bronze Medals to the next 1,321 high schools that passed the first two steps.
Congratulations to all of our Montgomery Medalist winners! Your hard work has paid off!!
Learn more about Montgomery and buying a Montgomery home by visiting, HatTeam.com. 
