Lakewood Ranked 167th Best High School In Ohio In US News And World Report

LAKEWOOD, OH - Lakewood High School landed at 167th in the U.S. News and World Report ranking of the Ohio's best high schools. The report broke high schools into certain metrics and then ranked them nationally and at the state level

The U.S. News and World Report Scorecard says that Lakewood students have a 93 percent proficiency in Math and a 94 percent proficiency in English. However, only 26 percent of Lakewood students are participating in AP Testing and 72 percent of those students are passing the tests, according to the report.

The harshest statistic in the U.S. News and World Report Scorecard is the high school's college readiness score, 20.4. For comparison, Avon Lake High School was ranked 12th in the state of Ohio and had a college readiness score of 62.0.

Update: An earlier version of this story stated that Lakewood did poorly in the rankings, which was incorrect. The story has been adjusted to better reflect the school's performance.

The 2017 rankings of best high schools identify the top-performing public schools at both the national and the state level and include date on more than 20,000 high schools. To be considered among the best, high schools had to pass a rigorous four-step process that sought to determine whether a school was serving all of its students and not just those who are college bound.

The first step determined whether students at a particular school were performing better than statistically expected for students in that state, factoring in percentages of economically disadvantaged students to identify schools. Schools that passed this step then moved on to step two, which assessed whether disadvantaged students performed at or better than state averages for the least-advantaged students.

For the next two steps, U.S. News looked at graduation rates and college readiness performance. To pass step three, high schools had to have a graduation rate of 75 percent or greater. For the 2017 rankings, the graduation rate reflect students who entered the ninth grade in the 2011-2012 school year. Finally, U.S. News calculated a college readiness index, which was the number of 12th graders who took and passed at least one AP test, divided by the number of 12th graders at that school.

To be ranked numerically nationally, schools had to pass steps 1-3 and have a college readiness index of 20.91 or above.

A total of 6,041 schools were ranked, 500 schools receiving gold medals, 2,109 schools receiving silver medals and the remaining 3,432 schools received bronze medals. Schools that received bronze medals passed the first three steps but were not ranked numerically in the national rankings. The state rankings were based on whether a high school received a gold, silver or a bronze medal and had a CRI value of 10 or higher. Previously, only gold and silver medal winners were ranked numerically on the state level.

The top high 10 schools in Ohio are:

1. Walnut Hills High School, Cincinnati
2. Wyoming High School, Wyoming
3. Indian Hill High School, Cincinnati
4. Bexley High School, Bexley
5. Madeira High School, Cincinnati
6. Aurora High School, Aurora
7. Hudson High School, Hudson
8. Olentangy Liberty High School, Olentangy Local
9. Dublin Jerome High School, Dublin
10. Olentangy High School, Lewis Center

Photo from Rick Uldricks, Patch