St. Charles North Ranked Among Best High Schools in Nation: Newsweek

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St. Charles North High School has been ranked among the best high schools in the nation, according to the Newsweek Top High Schools list for 2015, which was released Wednesday morning.

Newsweek ranked St. Charles North No. 387 in the country. Newsweek found the graduation rate at St. Charles North was 97.7 percent while 95.9 percent of students were college-bound. St. Charles East and other nearby Tri-Cities high schools did not make this year’s list.

>>> RELATED: These Suburban High Schools Ranked Among Best in Nation: Newsweek

The inclusion to this year’s list is a boost for St. Charles North. The school was not ranked among the top 500 schools in the nation in 2013 or in 2014.

The only Illinois school to crack the top ten nationwide in 2015 was Payton College Preparatory High School in Chicago.

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.

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“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

Other high-performing schools in the Chicago suburbs include: New Trier Township High School in Winnetka, ranked 14th nationally; Lake Forest High School in Lake Forest (No. 34 nationally), Adlai E. Stevenson High School (No. 82 nationally), William Fremd High School in Palatine (No. 104 in nation), Barrington High School (No. 161 nationally) and Wheaton North High School (No. 388 in the nation).