Final Adjustments to Best High Schools Rankings

Robert J. Morse

As discussed in detail in my May 30 blog post, "Adjusting the Best High Schools Rankings for Government Data Errors," the federal government found that data from the 2009-2010 school year for a small number of schools that appeared in the U.S. News 2012 Best High Schools rankings was incorrect. The information came from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which collects data from states for all public elementary and secondary schools annually and publishes that data on the Common Core of Data (CCD) website.

As a result of these errors in the federal government data, the U.S. News rankings for a few schools with these data errors were not correct. The federal government has now finished rechecking all public high school data; it has issued a final tally of which schools had incorrect data in 2009-2010 and has removed that data from the CCD website.

Based on this final list, a total 17 high schools, which amounts to only around 0.003 percent of the total number of the 2012 Best High Schools that were ranked gold, silver, or bronze, had incorrect rankings. As a result, U.S. News is changing all 17 schools from being ranked to unranked in the 2012 edition of the Best High Schools and removing any incorrect data that originated from the Department of Education's website.

Four high schools were already changed to unranked on May 30, 2012:

-- Dublin High School (California)

-- Estrella Foothills High School (Arizona)

-- Green Valley High School (Nevada)

-- San Marcos High School (California)

These are the additional 13 schools that are now also unranked in the 2012 Best High Schools rankings:

-- Appalachia High (Virginia)

-- Benjamin N. Cardozo High School (New York)

-- Brooklyn Technical High School (New York)

-- California Area Senior High School (Pennsylvania)

-- Francis Lewis High School (New York)

-- Gans High School (Oklahoma)

-- Hemet Academy For Applied Academics and Technology (California)

-- International Polytechnic High (California)

-- Midwood High School (New York)

-- Paseo Del Norte (Texas)

-- Renaissance High Continuation (California)

-- Romulus Central School (New York)

-- Vancleave High (Mississippi)