As the 2026–27 school year is about to begin, U.S. News & World Report has released its latest rankings of high schools across the nation. The Bromfield School ranks fourth in Massachusetts and 161st in the nation, putting it in the top 1% of schools in both categories.
Bromfield Principal Kim Murphy responded to the news, writing in an email that she is “exceedingly proud of our students and staff who work hard and truly value education.”
Massachusetts leads the nation in high-ranking schools overall. Nearly half the 408 ranked schools in the state are in the top quartile of the schools across the United States, as reported in the Boston Globe. Overall, U.S. News reviewed more than 27,000 schools nationwide and ranked just under 18,000.
The Bromfield School has a long history of standing high in the U.S. News rankings. In 2008, soon after the rankings began, it was listed as a silver-medal school—one of the top 500 schools in the country. By 2010, Bromfield had moved up to gold-medal status, putting it in the top 100 schools nationwide. (Those medal categories were purely symbolic, however; U.S. News did not award any actual medals.)
U.S. News ranks schools based on six factors, of which the greatest weight is given to college readiness. The study measures college readiness by the share of a school’s 12th-graders who earned a qualifying score on at least one Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exam in a given year. This year’s rankings are based on scores from the 2023–24 academic year. The magazine also judges a school’s college curriculum breadth by the share of students who scored well on those tests in more than one subject.
Other factors that U.S. News takes into account include a school’s graduation rate and how students score on state tests. For Massachusetts schools, that test is the MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System).
Over the years, Bromfield’s rank has bobbed around, but it has remained in the top 20 and often the top 10 in the state. For example, Bromfield ranked sixth in 2013, 14th in 2015, fifth in 2021, ninth in 2022, third in 2023, and 16th in 2025. While many of the schools on the Top-20 list remain the same from year to year, their position on the list often changes.
One factor in the volatility is Bromfield’s small size (see table). Bromfield is the smallest general high school in this year’s top 12 for Massachusetts. Only two charter schools had smaller enrollments. For Bromfield, the decision of one or two students not to take the Advanced Placement tests could change the school’s measure for college readiness by one or two percentage points. For Acton-Boxborough High School, with more than 1,600 students, a change by so few students would not affect the school’s overall score.
