Entries for December 2008

U.S. News recently published four additional lists as part of its second annual rankings of America's Best High Schools, which is based on an analysis of more than 21,000 public high schools in 48 states. These lists offer additional insights into the diverse characteristics of the schools that are part of the ranking.

The Best High Schools: Top Achievement High Schools list shows the Gold Medal schools with 25 percent or more of their students coming from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. The America's Best High Schools ranking methodology takes into account the relative performance of this group of students. The economically disadvantaged measure reflects the percentage of students enrolled in the school who are living in poverty, as defined by the state (where available) or the federal government. Typically, these students meet the federal criteria for receiving free or reduced-price lunches. But some states have enhanced their definitions to capture a broader population of students in need, particularly in high school, where social stigma may discourage students from enrolling in the free or reduced-price lunch program, which in turn causes this indicator to be artificially understated. Evaluating high schools by taking the socioeconomic circumstances of their students into account levels the playing field among schools, effectively assigning equivalent "degrees of difficulty" to each school's performance through the risk-adjusted performance index.

Since U.S. News recently published our second annual rankings of America's Best High Schools, there have been hundreds of comments, especially on the Best High Schools: Gold Medal List. We have been reading the comments, and I'll respond to some of the broader topics of the high school rankings in my blog.

There have been questions raised about how transparent U.S. News and our partner School Evaluation Services have been in answering questions from school officials about the rankings. If you are a high school or school district official or administrator with specific questions about your ranking, the accuracy of the data, or why your school was or was not ranked, please E-mail letters@usnews.com. Include details about the high school, including city, state, and county, your title, and E-mail address. Please limit inquiries to one official representative per school or district.

In his article "Why I Changed the Challenge Index," Washington Post reporter and columnist Jay Mathews explains that if he hadn't modified the methodology for his annual rating of high schools, there would have been underperforming schools at the top of the 2008 Washington Post high school rankings.

The schools in question—those whose students take lots of AP and IB exams but pass very few of them—wouldn't make it on U.S.News & World Report's "America's Best High Schools" list either. Our methodology is based on the key principles that a great high school must serve all its students well (not just those who are bound for college) and that it must be able to produce measurable academic outcomes to show that it is successfully educating its student body. Mathews's change is a start, but it does not go far enough.

U.S. News has just launched its second annual list of America's Best High Schools. The analysis of more than 21,000 public high schools in 48 states is available here and on newsstands as of December 8 in the magazine issue dated Dec. 1522, 2008.

To produce the 2009 America's Best High Schools rankings, U.S. News teamed up with School Evaluation Services (SES), a K-12 education data research business run by Standard & Poor's. SES developed the comprehensive methodology that judges how well high schools serve all their students, not just those who are collegebound.

You can read the America's Best High Schools 2009 methodology here. For those interested in a much more detailed version of the methodology, there is SES's Expanded Methodology (PDF).