Summary:
ZIP code 46614 in South Bend, Indiana is home to a single middle school — Jackson Middle School — which serves grades 6 through 8 and enrolls 537 students as part of the South Bend Community School Corp. Because it is the only middle school in the area, there are no local peers to compare it against, so the most useful benchmarks are its own district and the state of Indiana.
In 2025-2026, Jackson Middle School ranked 477th of 486 ranked Indiana middle schools — the 2nd percentile — and has earned 0 stars in each of the last three years. Proficiency on ILEARN is low across subjects: 8.04% in English/language arts, 8.13% in science and just 1.90% in math across all grades. Math is the sharpest failure point: about 1 in 53 students meet grade-level math standards overall, and 8th grade falls to 1.44%, or roughly 1 in 70. The school's math rate is only about 10% of its district's rate (1.90 vs 18.46), while its ELA rate is roughly 40% of the district's (8.04 vs 19.98). Chronic absenteeism stands at 43.4%, versus 40.3% for the district and 16.7% statewide — roughly 2.6 times the state rate.
That gap between inputs and outcomes is the most striking feature of the data. Jackson Middle School is not obviously under-resourced: it has a 12:1 student-teacher ratio and $16,978 in per-student spending (2023-2024), yet produces near-bottom-of-state results. About 72.25% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and the district — serving a similarly high-need population — still reaches 18-21% proficiency, which makes the within-district comparison the most informative and least flattering benchmark available. Note also that the data span different years: test scores are 2025-2026, absenteeism and staffing 2024-2025, and spending 2023-2024, so they should be read as context rather than as one aligned snapshot.
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