Bromfield received a silver medal in the U.S. News and World Report’s recent ranking of America’s best public high schools, placing it in the top three percent of the schools surveyed. In December, the magazine compared 18,790 public high schools in the U.S., choosing as the cream of the crop 100 gold medal schools, 405 silver medal schools, and 1,086 bronze medal schools. This is the first year the magazine, which has long rated colleges, has tried to measure high schools’ relative effectiveness.
The rankings are based on a school’s overall student achievement levels on state exams such as MCAS, and the percentage of students taking and passing advanced placement exams. The magazine used data from the 2005-2006 school year, the most recent available, to rate the schools. Of the gold-and-silver medal schools, 20 percent are exam schools, which choose their students by ability, and 5 percent admit students by lottery.
“We’re pleased to do well… we’re validated in our work, the hard work of our students and staff,” Bromfield Principal Jim O’Shea said in an interview this week, though he admitted that he’d like to have a gold medal in the rankings. U.S. News and World Report did not send the school an actual medal or certificate, but O’Shea did make copies of the magazine article listing the schools to give to a few people, he said.
According to the magazine’s website, the state of Massachusetts had the highest percentage of top-rated public schools. The state has five gold-medal schools and 23 silver-medal schools. The Massachusetts gold-medal schools are Boston Latin, Weston, Dover-Sherborn, Wellesley, and the Media and Technology Charter School in Boston. Several nearby high schools also received silver medals, including Acton-Boxborough, Nashoba, Westford, and Westborough high schools.
To qualify as one of “America’s best high schools,” the schools first had to do significantly better on their state achievement exams than expected given their demographics, a measurement the magazine called “poverty-adjusted performance.” Then, the magazine looked at whether the schools’ least-advantaged students (black, Hispanic, and low-income) were performing better than the average for similar students in the state. In Harvard’s case, there were so few minorities (2.7 percent of enrollment) and low-income students (.3 percent) that there were no data on these students’ test scores, as was the case in 16 percent of the other gold and silver medalists.
If a school cleared both those hurdles, then the magazine looked at the percentage of students who take and pass advanced placement tests, yielding a “college readiness index” score. Schools were ranked in order according to this score, and the 100 top schools received gold medals. All of the remaining schools that had college readiness scores above 20 were designated as silver medalists, and the rest of the schools got bronze medals. Bromfield’s college readiness index score is 48.3; by comparison, gold medalist Boston Latin, which is rated as number 19 in the entire country, has a college readiness score of 87.3.
More details on the rankings can be found at www.usnews.com/highschools.
