NYC's Best School Is In New Jersey, Niche Ranking Declares

NEW YORK CITY — The best school in New York City is in New Jersey, a new ranking says.

The Pingry School — a private high school in Basking Ridge — topped Niche's "2024 Best Schools in the New York City Area" released this week.

Schools actually inside New York City did fare well on the list, with Big Apple institutions grabbing most of the top 25.

Here are the top 10:

1. The Pingry School, Basking Ridge, New Jersey
2. Riverdale Country School, The Bronx
3. The Chapin School, Manhattan
4. Horace Mann School, The Bronx
5. The Brearley School, Manhattan
6. Trinity School, Manhattan
7. Lycée Français de New York, Manhattan
8. Newark Academy, Livingston, New Jersey
9. The Spence School, Manhattan
10. Convent of the Sacred Heart, Manhattan

Private schools dominated the list, as they did last year.

But the rankings showed their fortune rose and fell compared to the last list.

The Trinity School on the Upper West Side, for example, slipped from its number one perch last year to sixth in the New York City area, according to the new ranking. But that relative stumble isn't necessarily a knock against its quality — it's still the ninth-best private K-12 school in America, among other honors, the ranking found.

Only four public schools in the New York City area made the list's top 25.

The highest-ranked of those was Staten Island Technical High School, which grabbed the 20th spot, according to the ranking.

Niche ranked 94,058 public schools and 30,809 private schools. The platform said its rankings were created to provide families with valuable information — both quantitative and qualitative — on schools in their area or in a neighborhood they’re not familiar with yet.

The rankings differ from others that rely almost exclusively on test scores and academic performance in that it also includes input from students, alumni and parents, as well as quantitative data from sources such as the U.S. Department of Education to evaluate teachers, resources and facilities.