Every year, several organizations or businesses collect and analyze various data, run it through a methodology system, and come up with rankings for schools on a nationwide and/or statewide level.  Niche is a website that does just that.  

According to their website: "Niche is a website that helps you discover the schools and neighborhoods that are right for you. We rigorously analyze dozens of public data sets and millions of reviews to produce comprehensive rankings, report cards, and profiles for every K-12 school, college, and neighborhood in the U.S."

A few days ago, Niche published their rankings and profiles for school districts nationwide.  Some of the criteria used in their methodology included state test scores, college readiness, graduation rates, SAT/ACT scores, teacher quality, public school district ratings, and more.

Even though Niche used numerous sets of factual data in reaching their rankings, it should be noted that some of the criteria used in analyzing schools was a bit subjective as well, such as the reviews from the parents, teachers, and students.  Regardless, these rankings are always an interesting read and in many cases used as bragging rights or as a catalyst for dialogue, sometimes quite passionate dialogue.

We've gone through the Niche rankings for school districts in Texas and have segmented the results to only include districts from Deep East Texas.  That would include districts in Angelina, Nacogdoches, Houston, Trinity, Polk, Sabine, Shelby, and San Augustine counties, plus the southern half of Cherokee county and the northern half of Tyler, Jasper, and Newton counties.

Here are the top 10 rankings along with how the districts placed among the 985 districts that were analyzed:

  1. Cushing (93)
  2. Hudson (112)
  3. Central (153)
  4. Lovelady (155)
  5. Garrison (215)
  6. Lufkin (233)
  7. Big Sandy (234)
  8. Timpson (242)
  9. Martinsville (271)
  10. Douglass (282)

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