Newsweek Lists 15 Connecticut High Schools As Tops In The Country

By MARC TORRENCE and BARBARA HEINS (Patch Staff)

Just in time for the start of the school year, Newsweek released its annual list Wednesday of the top public high schools in America for 2015.

Connecticut has 15 schools that were included in the full list of the top 500 schools. In the top 100 are in Fairfield County — Weston High at #47 and Staples in Westport at #63. Other schools making the list were Ridgefield, Lyme-Old Lyme, Daniel Hand in Madison, Simsbury, Newtown, Farmington, Haddam-Killingworth, Pomperaug Regional High in Southbury, East Granby, Hall High in West Hartford, South Windsor, the Connecticut IB Academy in East Hartford and Woodstock Academy.

New Jersey has six of the top 10 public high schools in the country, while Virginia, Michigan, California and Illinois had one each.

Here are the top 10 high schools in the United States, according to Newsweek:

1. Thomas Jefferson High (Alexandria, VA)
2. High Technology High School (Lincroft, NJ)
3. Academy for Mathematics Science and Engineering (Rockaway, NJ)
4. Union County Magnet High School (Scotch Plains, NJ)
5. Bergen County Academies (Hackensack, NJ)
6. Gretchen Whitney High (Cerritos, CA)
7. Middlesex County Academy for Math Science & Engineering (Edison, NJ)
8. International Academy (Bloomfield Hills, MI)
9. Academy of Allied Health and Science (Neptune, NJ)
10. Walter Payton College Preparatory HS (Chicago, IL)

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.”

There are almost 30,000 public high schools in the United States.

Photo credit: U.S. Department of Education.