500 Best Schools In America: 6 Scotch Plains Schools On List

When you ask people why they live in New Jersey, you’ll hear one answer over and over… “it’s the schools.”

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

Newsweek’s list included Union County Magnet High School in Scotch Plains as its 4th best high school in America (3rd in state), Academy For Allied Health Sciences as 11th (7th in state), Academy For Information Technology as 24th (10th in state), Union County Tech as 83rd (20th in state), Academy For Performing Arts as 149th (32nd in state), and Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School Plains as 485th (56th in the state).

The Scotch Plains schools weren’t the only school in New Jersey to be recognized. Overall, the state had six of the top 10 public high schools in the country.

METHODOLOGY

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.”

See the full rankings here.