The top reported proficiency rate is 46% in English language arts. The lowest is 0% in Science.
Original Research by School Decision on Metro Schools Charter
Metro Schools Charter is a Minnesota charter district serving kindergarten through twelfth grade. Because it is a charter district, it operates independently of any single traditional school board and is not tied to a specific residential attendance zone. Families choose to enroll here from across the region.
The district’s academic picture, based on state assessment results, shows a mixed profile that varies notably by grade level. In the early elementary grades, student performance in both math and reading is mixed; a substantial share of third and fourth graders scored at or above proficiency, placing the district at a point where a family might want to compare these early results to typical peer performance in other area schools. Reading performance across grades three through seven holds roughly in that same range, with about half of students meeting the bar each year. The eighth-grade reading results, however, drop substantially, and that is a data point a family would want to discuss with the school.
Math results show a clearer pattern of decline as students get older. The share of students meeting proficiency in grades three through five is mixed, but in grade six the rate drops dramatically, and it remains low through grade seven before rising somewhat in grade eight. Science results are a serious concern: no students who took the fifth-grade or eighth-grade science assessment met the proficiency threshold. When compared to other districts in Hennepin County, Metro Schools Charter’s overall proficiency index sits above the midpoint of the county-wide range, but the wide spread in county scores means that statement alone does not tell a family much about the actual level of performance. The chronic absenteeism rate, while high in an absolute sense, is better than the median among Hennepin County districts.
Enrollment in the district is in the low thousands, spread fairly evenly across the grades from kindergarten through twelfth grade. The student body is overwhelmingly Black, representing the vast majority of the enrolled population. The data available does not include counts of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, receive special education services, or are classified as English learners, so it is not possible to characterize the socioeconomic or special-needs composition of the student body from this source.
The district operates five schools. Three are brick-and-mortar campuses: Metro College Prep, SET Academy Middle, and SET Academy Elementary. Two are fully online programs: Metro 2 Online and Online SET Academy. This means the district offers a genuine choice between in-person and remote instructional models. The online schools were formally approved during the 2020-2021 school year, as publicly reported, so they are a permanent option, not a pandemic-era temporary measure.
Because this is a charter district with no residential boundaries, there is no housing market to analyze and no neighborhood context to describe. Families who live anywhere in the metro area can apply. The per-pupil spending level falls in the middle-to-lower portion of the range among Hennepin County districts.
No graduation rate data was available for this district, and the state testing data does not include high school grades, so there is no picture of how students perform on end-of-course exams or whether they complete high school at a typical rate. A parent considering this district for a child who will remain through twelfth grade would want to ask the school directly about its high school graduation outcomes and about the academic supports in the middle grades, particularly in math and science.
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