Dana Hills and Aliso Niguel High Schools Earn Silver Medals for Academic Success

and are among Capistrano Unified School District’s comprehensive high schools named among the top 5 percent in the nation in the U.S. News & World Report annual rankings released Tuesday.

The others are Tesoro, San Clemente and Capistrano Valley, all of which received silver medals and were ranked in the top 1,000 schools nationwide. U.S. News evaluated and ranked nearly 22,000 high schools across the nation.

San Juan Hills High School opened in 2007 and did not have enough data to be evaluated in this year’s rankings, which looked at information from the 2009-2010 school year.

“Having all five of our eligible high schools ranked in the top 5 percent of this nation’s schools says a lot about the quality instruction that takes place in our classrooms every day to prepare our students for college and career,” Board President Dr. Gary Pritchard said. “This ranking evaluates how well public schools serve all of their students in preparing them to demonstrate proficiency in basic skills as well as readiness for college-level work, validating the hard work of our employees and the decisions we have made to emphasize classroom instruction.”

The five ranked high schools bettered the state’s academic goals and the college readiness index, which measures student participation and performance on Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate tests.

U.S. News has not published high school rankings since 2009. In June 2011, Newsweek published its own listing of the country’s best high schools. In that evaluation, Aliso Niguel High School was ranked No. 217 and Capistrano Valley High School was listed at No. 459. Newsweek used a different methodology for determining school ranks, which included AP, IB, and SAT scores and graduation and college attendance rates.

(From a press release)