Best High Schools: Gold Medal List
We looked at more than 21,000 public high schools in 48 states. The following are the 100 schools that performed the best in our three-step America’s Best High Schools analysis.
- yellow
- Based on Advanced Placement (AP) tests
- blue
- Based on International Baccalaureate (IB) tests
- green
- Based on both Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate tests
| Rank | School Name and Location | Quality-adjusted Exams per Test Taker |
College Readiness |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology Alexandria, VA | 6.8 | 100.0 |
| 2 | Oxford Academy Cypress, CA | 4.4 | 99.5 |
| 3 | Pacific Collegiate Charter Santa Cruz, CA | 4.1 | 98.8 |
| 4 | High Technology High School Lincroft, NJ | 3.1 | 98.4 |
| 5 | Design and Architectural Senior High Miami, FL | 2.7 | 97.8 |
| 6 | International Academy Bloomfield Hills, MI | 5.9 | 97.8 |
| 7 | International Baccalaureate School at BHS Bartow, FL | 5.3 | 97.5 |
| 8 | Preuss School UCSD La Jolla, CA | 1.9 | 97.1 |
| 9 | Academic Magnet High School No. Charleston, SC | 4.0 | 95.5 |
| 10 | Gretchen Whitney High Cerritos, CA | 4.1 | 94.4 |
| 11 | Pine View School Osprey, FL | 4.1 | 94.4 |
| 12 | Maine School of Science & Math Limestone, ME | 2.8 | 94.4 |
| 13 | Basis Tucson Tucson, AZ | 3.2 | 93.8 |
| 14 | International School Bellevue, WA | 2.6 | 91.8 |
| 15 | Ridgeview Classical Charter Schools Fort Collins, CO | 2.9 | 91.3 |
| 16 | Benjamin Franklin Senior High School New Orleans, LA | 3.3 | 90.7 |
| 17 | Early College at Guilford Greensboro, NC | 3.4 | 90.0 |
| 18 | School of Science & Engineering Dallas, TX | 5.6 | 88.9 |
| 19 | Idea College Preparatory Donna, TX | 1.0 | 88.9 |
| 20 | Raleigh Charter High Raleigh, NC | 4.8 | 88.9 |
| 21 | Lennox Mathematics, Science, and Technology Academy Lennox, CA | 1.5 | 88.6 |
| 22 | University High School Tucson, AZ | 4.7 | 87.7 |
| 23 | Stuyvesant High School New York, NY | 3.6 | 87.6 |
| 24 | International Community School Kirkland, WA | 3.6 | 87.5 |
| 25 | Loveless Academic Magnet Program High School Montgomery, AL | 2.4 | 86.8 |
| See schools 26 - 50 » | |||
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Reader Comments
This whole study is a cherry-pick
When a study judges the quality of a school by the performance of its students, and then biases its sample by including schools like TJ which select for high-performing students in the first place, it amounts to cherry-picking. Anyone truly trained in science should understand that with such a sample bias, there's no evidence that the higher performance of the school's students has ANYTHING to do with the school. If TJ were really so great at teaching math and science, its students and alums would be mentioning that serious flaw in their comments here, instead of cheering themselves on. Don't they teach statistics there?
Whether it's publicly funded or not is a moot issue; all performance-admission magnet schools can be expected to outperform the schools they draw from. Even if the teachers were rotated around between the schools, and other factors kept the same, kids with better grades separated into their own group are likely to continue to get better grades on average. The only scientific way to prove it's really the school would be to set up a control group.
I could have gone to TJ's first year, but I hadn't been working hard enough on grades. It turned out much better that I stayed at my original school. I knew a lot of the kids in TJ's inaugural class, and I doubt any of them could have managed a BA in math in under 2 years like I did. It was FCPS that prepared me for that, I didn't need any science/tech specialty school. If I'd gotten into TJ, I doubt I would have learned much about political science, sociology, history, classic literature, or philosophy either. Instead of learning Russian to fluency, I'd have just gone through the motions like the physics grad students who took the class because it was co-requisite. Better to have a broad, comprehensive education than to end up a well-paid nerd in a lab somewhere.
nonsense
Why do they have a handicap factor for the minority and poverty levels, to get these scores.
Double Standard
everyone was perfectly aware that it's double standard since they choose not to consider private & public schools. If I was them, I would redo it correctly since it's not accurate! I'm sure they are not interested in this since they did not make any plans to redo it
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