The U.S. News & World Report, a media based company most commonly known for their rankings of universities and hospitals, announced Thursday its annual national and state rankings of high schools.
The report listed Westfield High School as the highest ranked school in Hamilton County, 6th overall in Indiana and 561st nationally out of a total 28,496 high schools reviewed. Carmel and Hamilton Southeastern were also included in the top 10 state-wide. Nearby Zionsville ranked second in the state and 311th nationally.
U.S News & World Report teamed with RTI International, a global nonprofit social science research firm to produce the high school rankings.
According to the report rankings were based on these key principles: that a great high school must serve all of its students well, not just those who are college bound, and that it must be able to produce measurable academic outcomes to show it is successfully educating its student body across a range of performance indicators.
A four-step process was used to rank the schools. The first three steps ensured that the schools serve all of their students well, using their performance on the math and reading parts of their state proficiency tests and their graduation rates as the benchmarks. For those schools that made it past the first three steps, a fourth step assessed the degree to which schools prepare students for college-level work.
- Step 1: The first step determined whether each school’s students were performing better than statistically expected for students in that state.
- Step 2: For schools passing the first step, Step 2 assessed whether their disadvantaged students – black, Hispanic and low-income – performed at or better than the state average for the least-advantaged students.
- Step 3: For schools passing the first and second step, Step 3 required schools to meet or surpass a benchmark for their graduation rate. This is the second year U.S. News has included this step.
- Step 4: Schools that made it through the first three steps became eligible to be judged nationally on the final step – college-readiness performance – using Advanced Placement test data as the benchmark for success. AP is a College Board program that offers college-level courses at high schools across the country.
A complete list of school rankings and a detailed explanation of the ranking process can be viewed at https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/search?state-urlname=indiana&sort=alpha-ascending