Summary:
Zip code 61342 has one middle school, Northbrook School, serving grades 5–8 and enrolling 526 students. With no other middle school in the area list, the most useful comparisons are with Illinois and across Northbrook’s grades and recent years. The clearest concern is mathematics: Northbrook’s 2025–2026 all-grade proficiency rate was 22%, compared with 40% statewide, a 17-point gap.
Northbrook’s strongest result is ELA, where its all-grade rate was 56.9% versus 56.3% statewide—about 1 point higher. Its eighth-grade ELA result was also above the state rate, 65% compared with 63%, while fifth- and sixth-grade results were 6 and 4 points below the state, and seventh grade matched it. Math was below the state in every grade: the largest gap was in fifth grade, at 22 points (14% versus 36%); even the smallest, in sixth grade, was 9 points. Eighth-grade science was close to the state, 51% versus 52%, while fifth-grade science was 8 points lower. There is no local top or bottom school to distinguish because Northbrook is the only school in the list.
Recent results show ELA improving slightly but losing ground relative to Illinois, while math fell further behind. From 2024–2025 to 2025–2026, Northbrook’s all-grade ELA rate rose by 1 point, but its state lead narrowed from 3 points to 1; math fell by 6 points as the state rose by 1, widening Northbrook’s shortfall from 10 to 17 points. SchoolDigger’s rank-history percentile was 50 in 2023–2024, 54 in 2024–2025, and 35 in 2025–2026. As context, Northbrook’s student-teacher ratio was 13.8 in 2024–2025, and 59% of students were free/reduced lunch eligible that year; these figures describe the school, not the reasons for its results.
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