Look at that. Riverside's advantage is just 1.5 percentage points in reading and 3.2 points in mathematics.
Those differences are real in the reported results, but they're hardly the chasm one might imagine between the state's first-ranked and 32nd-ranked schools.
There's another revealing comparison: using its own scoring methodology, that independent website ranks Old Greenwich fourth in Connecticut and Riverside fifth on the same 2024–25 data.
So we have one ranking system placing Riverside first and Old Greenwich 32nd, and another placing Old Greenwich fourth and Riverside fifth.
That is quite a demonstration of how much the choice of methodology matters.
Why a small difference can become 31 ranking positions
There are three plausible explanations.
First: ranking compression. At the upper end of Connecticut's elementary school performance distribution, there are many extremely high-achieving schools. Differences of just a few percentage points can separate dozens of schools. Being 32nd doesn't mean Old Greenwich is 31 units worse than Riverside; ranks are ordinal positions, not measures of educational distance.
Second: demographic adjustments. Even though the two neighborhoods appear nearly identical economically, the formula doesn't know their history or geography. It uses school-level demographic data. Small differences in the proportions of economically disadvantaged students or particular student groups can alter the model's expected performance, and therefore a school's adjusted score.
I haven't established whether those differences actually explain the Riverside–Old Greenwich gap.
Third: the new scoring system. For 2027, U.S. News began incorporating more detailed achievement levels, rather than simply distinguishing between students who met proficiency standards and those who didn't.
Consider two hypothetical schools, each with 90% of students meeting proficiency standards. One has considerably more students in the highest achievement category. The new methodology can distinguish between them, even though their headline proficiency rates are identical.
This is particularly relevant to affluent Greenwich schools, where so many children already clear the basic proficiency threshold.
One more interesting finding
Old Greenwich's academic results aren't consistently inferior across different years.
For example, SchoolDigger reports that Old Greenwich's 2025–26 third graders achieved 92.5% proficiency in mathematics. But its fifth graders achieved only 74.1% in mathematics that year.
That's a substantial difference between cohorts within the same school. [FWIW: I’ll point out that those 5th graders were victims of the COVID shutdown years. Remember AFT union head Randi, “Kids are Resilient” Weingarten? She was wrong, and she knew it.]
It suggests another possible explanation: a few particularly strong or weak classes can materially change the results for a relatively small elementary school.
And there's an important distinction here. These are different cohorts, not evidence that children lost ground as they progressed from third to fifth grade.
What I would conclude — and what remains unanswered
Your original intuition appears well supported: the schools are far closer academically than their U.S. News ranking positions suggest.
But I can't yet establish exactly how much of the 31-place difference comes from raw achievement, how much from demographic adjustment, and how much from the distribution of scores across achievement levels. I could verify the published 2027 methodology and independent test results, but U.S. News blocked direct access to its detailed school profiles.
…. And there's a broader question I think your example raises.
When a school serves children who arrive with enormous educational advantages, is the school itself producing extraordinary academic results, or is it primarily benefiting from the advantages its students bring with them?
U.S. News attempts to address that question with its demographic adjustment. But a statistical adjustment cannot fully separate the contributions of teachers, parents, inherited advantages, peer groups, and everything else that influences children's achievement.
The most striking finding here is that another ranking of the same two schools, using the same state's test data, actually reverses their order — and places them adjacent to each other.
That makes me considerably more skeptical of the apparent significance of Riverside's #1 versus Old Greenwich's #32 than of either school's educational quality.
