Newsweek Names Minooka School Among Country's Best

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.

And on that list is Minooka Community High School at No. 349. While that may seem like a low number, it’s important to remember that only 500 schools made the list out of nearly 30,000. The school did not make the list in either 2013 or 2014.

In addition to being named one of the best, the school met Newsweek’s Equity measure by helping low-income students score at or above average on state assessments.

Minooka Community School District 111 Superintendent Dr. James Blanche said the ranking was not because of one single thing the school does, but because of expectations from the community and the school’s expectations from its students and staff.

Blanche said the school’s ACT scores are consistently above average and they’re even higher from where they were a year ago.

“We see that as a really good thing,” Blanche said. ”Our AP exams are almost always above the state average. We have kids walk in the door that are already high performing and it’s our job to challenge those kids.”

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.

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)

New Jersey has six of the top 10 public high schools in the country, while Virginia, Michigan, California and Illinois had one each. The list includes 500 schools.

See the full rankings here.