Newsweek Selects Spring-Ford Area Senior High School as a One of "America's Top High Schools"

Newsweek Selects Spring-Ford Area Senior High School as a One of “America’s Top High Schools”

An ongoing and determined commitment to educational excellence has thrust Spring-Ford Area School District in the national limelight in a big way: Spring-Ford Area Senior High School 10-12 Grade Center was nationally ranked this week in Newsweek’s 2014 “America’s Top High Schools” report. With more than 14,000 high schools under consideration, Spring-Ford was ranked in the top 500.

According to the publication’s website, “Newsweek’s 2014 Rankings highlights schools that do the absolute best job of preparing students for college.” Spring-Ford, like the other high-achieving high schools, shined primarily because of its students’ competence on state standardized assessments. Newsweek created an index to locate within each state those schools that achieved a percentile of at least 80.

A College Readiness Score was assigned to each school which factored in critical criteria such as enrollment and graduation rates, SAT/ACT and AP composite scores, counselor-to-student ratios and holding power (efforts to control student attrition). Spring-Ford’s data shined.

“Having this national recognition tells us what we already know: That we are on the right track. Now everybody else knows it, too,” said Dr. Goodin.

This is the first time in the District’s 59-year history that it has received recognition from Newsweek, but certainly not the first time its educational efforts have been singled out. Recently, Spring-Ford’s scores on the Pennsylvania School Performance Profile placed the District in the top 2.5 percent of the state and earned seven of the District’s schools the Governor’s Award for Excellence in Academics.

“While the nation strives for educational excellence, here at Spring-Ford we have become a microcosm of what student achievement and excellence in public education should truly look like. It is a time to celebrate the hard work our entire District has done,” said Joe Ciresi, School Board president.

How Newsweek Conducted Its Rankings

Newsweek changed how it ranked high schools this year, creating two lists of schools. One was an absolute list of rankings, which included Spring-Ford. The other, a so-called relative list, was comprised of schools whose students live in low socio-economic conditions. Some of those schools made both lists.

For the absolute list, Newsweek ranked schools using an index that was created using performance indicators taken from standardized assessments provided by each state. The index identified schools performing at or above the 80th percentile.

For more information, click here. http://www.newsweek.com/high-schools/top-10-schools-2014#