Six San Diego Area Schools Ranked Among Top High Schools in the Nation

By Marc Torrence, Patch Staff

Newsweek has released its annual list of the top public high schools in America for 2015.

The following San Diego area high schools made the list:

• River Valley Charter High School: No. 94
• Westview High School: No. 97
• Canyon Crest Academy: No. 117
• Del Norte High School: No. 209
• Torrey Pines High School: No. 336
• Classical Academy: No. 493

See the full rankings here.

The rankings were compiled using several metrics, including graduation rate, college enrollment rate, SAT and ACT scores, AP and IB scores and participation, teacher-student ratio and dropout rates.

“Some factors are more important, especially since our rankings focus on college readiness,” Jim Impoco, editor in chief of Newsweek, told Patch via email. “We place emphasis on criteria like college enrollment and graduation rate since we know that those are some of the biggest indicators of whether students are prepared for college.”

This year’s rankings were weighted by:

• Enrollment Rate—25 percent
• Graduation Rate—20 percent
• Weighted AP/IB/Dual Enrollment composite—17.5 percent
• Weighted SAT/ACT composite—17.5 percent
• Change in student enrollment between 9th-12th grades, to control for dropout rates—10 percent
• Counselor-to-Student Ratio—10 percent

“The top 20 schools on the ‘America’s Top High Schools’ are neck and neck. They all have perfect or near-perfect college enrollment and graduation rates,” Impoco said. “You start to see more variation as you look further down the list and also when you look at the factors that have less weight, like test scores.”