Is This The Best High School In America?

Is This The Best High School In America?, When considering your child’s education, it may be hard not to focus on the potential loans needed to pay for college or the outlook of the post-graduation job market. Sending your child to a top high school can ease that transition into the adult world. Often, students who graduate from a great high school do so with college credits, scholarship money, and marketable skills.

To help guide you through the universe of public high schools, U.S. News today released the fourth edition of the Best High Schools rankings, available exclusively online. While the previous high school rankings published in December 2009 included information on 1,800 schools, the 2012 rankings include data on nearly 22,000 public high schools from 49 states and the District of Columbia. (Nebraska did not report enough data to be included in the rankings.)

U.S. News partnered with the Washington, DC-based American Institutes for Research (AIR), which implemented U.S. News’s rankings methodology. To determine the Best High Schools national rankings, schools were first*n*lyzed at the state level in terms of how well students in each school performed on state assessments, taking into account the test scores of disadvantaged students (low-income, Hispanic, and black), who tend to score lower on tests.

High schools that made it through this*n*lysis were then eligible to be ranked nationally, in terms of college readiness. U.S. News determines the degree to which schools prepare students for college-level work by*n*lyzing student success in Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) programs, both of which include college-level courses. U.S. News awarded more than 4,850 gold, silver, and bronze medals to the top-performing schools.

Among the top 20 Best High Schools, four are charter schools, which usually accept a limited number of students through an application process and are also exempt from some of the government regulations of other public schools, so long as they successfully meet the criteria of their original charter. Two schools in the top 20 are magnet schools, which use an application process that typically involves test scores and grade point averages to attract the most talented students in a region. (Yahoo! News)