Here Are U.S. News' Best High Schools In The Country For 2018

Over 2,700 high schools in the country made the cut for U.S. News & World Report's annual rankings of the best high schools in the U.S. The 2018 list ranked 2,711 high schools and awarded the schools gold and silver medals to judge college-readiness.

The rankings were released on Wednesday and evaluate over 20,500 public high schools. U.S. News says it identified schools that best serve all students and assessed how prepared students are for college-level work.

Arizona dominated in the overall rankings, with six of the high schools in the top 10 being Arizona schools. The state also took the top spot on the list as BASIS Scottsdale was ranked the No. 1 high school in the country by U.S. News.

While Arizona dominated in the overall rankings, the top state performer was Massachusetts. The state-by-state performance rating was based on which states have the highest proportion of schools with gold and silver medals. Based on this metric, Massachusetts was the leading performer, followed by California and Maryland. Overall, only 500 schools were awarded gold medals by U.S. News and the remaining ranked schools all received silver medals.

Here are the top performing states, according to U.S. News:

Massachusetts (1)

California (2)

Maryland (3)

Florida (4)

Maine (5)

Vermont (6)

Connecticut (7)

Kansas (7)

New Hampshire (9)

Delaware (10)

“Top-ranked schools succeed in three main areas: exceeding expectations on state proficiency tests, offering challenging coursework and graduating their students,” Anita Narayan, managing editor of Education at U.S. News, said in a press release.

The top 10 high schools in the U.S. overall are:

1. BASIS Scottsdale (AZ)
2. BASIS Chandler (AZ)
3. BASIS Oro Valley (AZ)
4. BASIS Tucson North (AZ)
5. BASIS Flagstaff (AZ)
6. Meridian School (TX)
7. International Academy of Macomb (MI)
8. BASIS Peoria (AZ)
9. Baccalaureate School for Global Education (NY)
10. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (VA)

To determine the rankings, U.S. News teamed up with the social science research firm RTI International. A variety of data sources, including the Common Core of Data, College Board and the International Baccalaureate, were used.

A four-step process was used to rank all eligible schools. The first two steps were to determine whether students were performing better than statistically expected in the state, and whether minority students were performing at or better than the state average for minority students. The third step required schools to meet or surpass a certain graduation benchmark and the final step was to determine college readiness. (You can read the full methodology here.)

You can see how your state performed in the rankings and which schools made it to the 2018 list here.

Image via Shutterstock