re: Does school rankings matter for elementary and middle vs high school?

None of us can probably give you much feedback on how to assess WA schools, if we're being honest.

You really have to understand the dynamics of the feeding areas. 35% minority enrollment, reading numbers, etc. will tell SOME story, but that means different things in different regions.

For example, if you took the numbers of Lake Highlands High in Dallas, you'd probably avoid. But some of those numbers have been the same for years and it's consistently pumped out big school matriculating kids who do very well and who enjoy HS life. You'd have to understand that half the kids live in apartments and half the kids live in established neighborhoods and there has traditionally been minimal overlap to understand how a 50% minority school with bad test results is mostly fine. We have some similar schools in Atlanta.

But, a caveat is that those numbers typically aren't reflected in the elementary levels, because they're neighborhood schools and are only fed by a subset of the HS footprint (ie, mostly apts or mostly SFH in nice areas).