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America's Best High Schools Heads to Times Square
Tweet Share on Facebook December 31, 2009 Comment (4)The recent release of our 2010 America's Best High Schools rankings continues to draw lots of attention in local communities nationally. These rankings will now get global visibility on a different stage, New York's Times Square, as part of tonight's New Year's Eve celebration.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced that he will be joined in Times Square on New Year's Eve to push the button for the ceremonial lowering of the New Year's Eve ball by students from the 12 New York City public high schools that earned a spot on the America's Best High Schools' Top 100 "Gold Medal" List. The schools represent all parts of New York since each of the city's five boroughs is home to at least one of these top-ranked high schools.
Mayor Bloomberg said:
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Why 5 Montgomery County, Md., High Schools Are Honorable Mention
Tweet Share on Facebook December 18, 2009 Comment (4)Since the release of our new America's Best High Schools listings, there has been a great deal of focus on the performance of a few high schools in Montgomery County, Md., an affluent suburb of Washington. The key question has been why three high schools in Montgomery County—Walt Whitman High School, Thomas S. Wootton High School, and Winston Churchill High School—that had been gold schools in the 2009 America's Best High School rankings slipped to become honorable mention among Maryland's public high schools in the 2010 America's Best High Schools listings. Two other Montgomery County schools—Walter Johnson High School and Richard Montgomery High School—went from being unranked in previous years to honorable mention in the 2010 rankings.
What is honorable mention status, and why was it included in the America's Best High Schools rankings for the second year in a row? U.S. News believes that being ranked honorable mention is a significant achievement. An honorable mention school:
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Table: Montgomery County, Md., School Performance on State Tests
Tweet Share on Facebook December 17, 2009 Comment (7)This table shows Montgomery County, Md., the high schools' risk-adjusted performance index values, along with the state test performance index explained above and the percentage of students who are economically disadvantaged (the latter is a measure of student poverty representing the percent of students receiving free or reduced-price lunch).
This table is sorted by risk-adjusted performance index, highest to lowest. You'll notice that some high schools came close to being greater than 1.0, the value needed to pass Step 1, but only one high school in Montgomery County—Montgomery Blair High School—actually met the Step 1 criterion.
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Table: Index Values for Montgomery County, Md., High Schools
Tweet Share on Facebook December 17, 2009 Comment (1)This table shows the index values for Montgomery County, Md., high schools for the past two years, along with recognition status that U.S. News assigned the schools in the previous two America's Best High Schools rankings. Note: The 2009 list used data from 2006-07, and the 2010 list used data from 2007-08.
[Read Why 5 Montgomery County, Md., High Schools Are Honorable Mention.]
[Read more from America's Best High Schools.]
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Why High Schools Move in and out of the Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook December 11, 2009 Comment (3)Since the release of our new 2010 America's Best High Schools listings, a frequent question has been why schools rise or fall in the rankings. There are three main reasons a school changed its place or lost its place entirely in the 2010 America's Best High Schools rankings.
1. Changes in relative performance on state tests
Some schools fell off the list altogether because they are no longer among the best-performing schools on their statewide tests—meaning that their overall student performance on state tests did not exceed statistical expectations (step 1) or the performance of their least advantaged students was not as good as the state average (step 2). Without successfully meeting both of these two state-test-focused steps, schools are not eligible for any medal recognition, although they are still evaluated independently on their college readiness to determine whether they merit honorable mention. In some cases, schools that earned medals last year but had a lower performance on state tests earned honorable mention status this year. Read the America's Best High Schools ranking methodology for more details. -
The New America's Best High School Rankings Are Here
Tweet Share on Facebook December 10, 2009 Comment (2)U.S. News has just launched its third annual list of America's Best High Schools. The analysis of more than 21,000 public high schools in 48 states and the District of Columbia is available online and on newsstands later this month.
To produce the 2010 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.
In addition to the methodology, there are numerous other rankings, lists, and articles to check out:
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What's New for the 2011 Best Graduate School Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook December 3, 2009 Comment (17)What's new for the upcoming 2011 edition of America's Best Graduate Schools? For the first time, U.S. News has separate peer assessment survey instruments that use a five-point scale for part-time law J.D. programs and part-time M.B.A. programs. As a result, U.S. News is contemplating significant methodology changes in both of these popular rankings. The 2011 edition of the rankings will be published in April 2010.
What will these changes mean for the upcoming part-time law J.D. program rankings?
This fall, we have asked law school deans, deans of academic affairs, chairs of faculty appointments, and the most recently tenured faculty members to rate 99 part-time J.D. programs on a scale from marginal (1) to outstanding (5). Those respondents who do not know enough about a law school's part-time J.D. program to evaluate it fairly are asked to mark "don't know." A part-time law J.D. program's peer assessment score will now be based on the average of all the respondents who rated it.
In addition to having a peer score on a 5.0 scale, U.S. News is contemplating including other factors in the upcoming part-time law J.D. program rankings. Additional ranking variables under consideration include:
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