3 Philadelphia High Schools Ranked Among 50 Best In PA By US News

PHILADELPHIA – The Philadelphia area is home to some of the best schools in the nation, and a new list from U.S. News & World Report of the best high schools in Pennsylvania includes several Philly high schools.

Five Pennsylvania schools earned gold medal schools, while 102 schools received a silver medal, and 109 more got a bronze.

One Philly school earned a gold medal while two others earned silver.

Julia R. Masterman Secondary School earned the gold medal and was ranked the No. 2 best school in the state.

Central High School came in at No. 20 and the Academy at Palumbo No. 47.

U.S. News & World Report released its new ranks Wednesday, May 9.

The new list evaluates more than 20,500 public high schools.

See the full list of PA high school ranks here.

U.S. News identified schools that best serve all students and assessed how prepared students are for college-level work.

Schools are also recognized with gold, silver and bronze medals with gold indicating the greatest level of college readiness.

"Top-ranked schools succeed in three main areas: exceeding expectations on state proficiency tests, offering challenging coursework and graduating their students," Anita Narayan, managing editor of education at U.S. News, said in a press release.

U.S. News also ranked the states. Pennsylvania, where 15.8 percent of schools received a gold or silver medal, tied with Ohio for 14th place in that rating. The state-by-state performance rating was based on which states have the highest the highest proportion of schools with gold and silver medals. Massachusetts was the leading performer, followed by California and Maryland.

To determine the rankings, U.S. News teamed up with the social science research firm RTI International. A variety of data sources, including the Common Core of Data, College Board and the International Baccalaureate, were used.

A four-step process was used to rank all eligible schools. The first two steps were to determine whether students were performing better than statistically expected in the state and whether minority were performing at or better than the state average for minority students, which was the second step.

The third step required schools to meet or surpass a certain graduation benchmark. The final step was to determine college readiness. (You can read the full methodology here.)

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