Maryland Lands 7 Schools on Newsweek's Top Public High Schools List

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.

Seven Maryland schools made the list, with two from Bethesda, and five total from Montgomery County Public Schools being recognized. High schools in Rockville, Potomac and Poolesville also made the list, along with Owings and Ijamsville.

Here’s where the Maryland schools ranked:

• No. 110 Poolesville High School in Poolesville
• No. 187 Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda
• No. 254 Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville
• No. 268 Winston Churchill High School in Potomac
• No. 344 Urbana High School in Ijamsville
• No. 395 Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda
• No. 449 Northern High School in Owings

SEE ALSO: Three Maryland Schools Recognized for ‘Beating the Odds’

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)

SEE ALSO: Six High Schools With Best Teacher Ratings in Montgomery County

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.

Thomas Jefferson took the top spot for the second year in a row. Neither Academy for Mathematics Science and Engineering nor Bergen County made the list in 2014, while Union County dropped to the No. 4 spot from No. 2.

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.”