Newsweek Names West Morris Central Among Nation's Best High Schools - Again

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, once again, West Morris Central High School shows it’s among not only the best in the state, but across the nation. The list of top 500 public high schools in the country has Central at number 151 overall, and third in Morris County behind magnet school Academy for Mathematics, Science, and Engineering in Rockaway, and Chatham High School.

It’s been an incredible summer for the area, ranking second in the state for safest towns along with Central getting another nod for having some of the best teachers in New Jersey.

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.

Thomas Jefferson took the top spot for the second year in a row. High Technology High School rocketed to No. 2 from No. 185 last year.

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.

New Jersey had a strong showing overall, with 56 schools – more than 10-percent of the list – appearing in the top 500.

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 nearly 30,000 public high schools in the United States.