Best Public Schools in Madison, WI

Madison, Wisconsin is home to 53 schools serving students from prekindergarten through grade 12 — 31 elementary, 12 middle, 8 high, and 2 alternative schools — with a combined enrollment of 24,302 students. Most belong to Madison Metropolitan School District, whose district-wide rank is 321 of 432 in Wisconsin, the 26th percentile or 1 star, while Isthmus Montessori Academy Public is an independent charter and Mendota Mental Health Institution is a state Department of Health Services school. That modest district average masks enormous school-to-school variation.

At the top, Shorewood Hills Elementary (99th percentile, with ELA and math proficiency up to 96.3%), Hamilton Middle (97th), West High (94th), and Van Hise Elementary (92nd) rank among the best in the state, alongside Spring Harbor Middle (89th) and Randall Elementary School (86th). West High is the clear high-school flagship, while LaFollette High sits at the 20th percentile with math and science proficiency around 27%. Several higher-poverty schools beat the odds, including Marquette Elementary (36.09% FRPL, 80th percentile), Lowell Elementary (67th), and Lincoln Elementary (13.3% chronic absenteeism). East High rose from the high teens to the 50th percentile.

Chronic absenteeism is the most pervasive challenge: the state rate is 17.3% and the district figure is 29.6%, and only a few schools fall below the state mark, while Capital High reaches 81.3%. Low-performing schools tend to cluster at high poverty and high absenteeism, but spending and class size do not simply explain results — West High has the highest student-teacher ratio yet top outcomes. Finally, PK–2 and specialized schools lack comparable test or rank data, which should be read as missing information rather than weakness.