Newsweek Lists Three Virginia High Schools as Tops in the Country

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

In Virginia, three high schools made the list, including Fairfax County’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology which came in this year at #1. Here’s a little about TJ, according to Newsweek:

• The average ACT score is 32.
• The average SAT score is 2182.
• The average AP score is 4.45.

Also read: Which Fairfax County Public Schools’ Middle Schools Sent the Most Students to TJ?

Other Virginia schools on the list were Hidden Valley High School in Roanoke, coming in at #432 and Albemarle High School in Charlottesville at #471.

Here are the top 10 high schools in the United States, according to Newsweek:

1. Thomas Jefferson High (Fairfax County, 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)

New Jersey has six of the top 10 public high schools in the country, while Virginia, Michigan, California and Illinois had one each. The list includes 500 schools.

Thomas Jefferson took the top spot for the second year in a row. 

Neither Academy for Mathematics Science and Engineering nor Bergen County made the list in 2014, while Union County dropped to the No. 4 spot from No. 2.

See the full rankings here.

New Jersey has six of the top 10 public high schools in the country, while Virginia, Michigan, California and Illinois had one each. The full list includes 500 schools.

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