Massachusetts High Schools Ranked Among Nation's Top 500

By PATRICK LUCE (Patch Staff)

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.

Nineteen Massachusetts towns are included on the list of the top 500, from Dover-Sherborn, ranked 16th in the country, to Chelmsford High School at 492. The complete Massachusetts list includes:

• 16. Dover-Sherborn Regional High School
• 52. Medfield Senior High School
• 54. Weston High School
• 67. Newton High School
• 75. Westwood High School
• 93. Hopkinton High School
• 115. Hingham High School
• 128. Shrewsbury Senior High School
• 139. Gronton Dunstable Regional High School
• 207. Longmeadow High School
• 253. Newburyport High School
• 278. Georgetown High School
• 315. Arlington High School
• 381. King Phillip Regional High School (Wrentham)
• 396. Marblehead High School
• 424. Ashland High School
• 448. Natick High School
• 451. Braintree High School
• 492. Chelmsford High School

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)

See the full rankings here.

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.