East Greenwich Skyrockets, Barrington Evaporates from Newsweeks' Best High School Rankings

East Greenwich High School is the top High School in Rhode Island, according to Newsweek’s 2015 ranking of the top 500 high schools in America.

The rankings were released Wednesday, just in time for the start of the school year.

Surprisingly, Barrington High School, which has held the top spot in Rhode Island in the annual ranking for years, is not even on the list this year.

Meanwhile, East Greenwich, which was ranked 283 last year, has jumped, finishing at No. 186.

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 almost 30,000 public high schools in the United States. See the full rankings here.

East Greenwich was given a “college readiness” score of 81.8 percent and has a graduation rate of 98.9 percent, according to the rankings. More than ninety-three percent of students are college bound and the poverty rate is a low 6 percent.

The rankings might be discouraging for many Rhode Islanders, not just families in Barrington. Parents in that town will be surprised to find that the school, long-considered the benchmark for the rest of the state, didn’t crack the top 500. And East Greenwich is the only school on the list.

Meanwhile the nearby states of New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts have a bevy of schools making the cut. And check out New Jersey in particular; the Garden State boasts having six of the top ten public schools in America.

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)