New rankings: A few High Desert high schools shine while half fall near bottom of their class

A new ranking of more than 17,800 U.S. high schools gives glowing report cards to a handful of High Desert institutions, including a few in small unincorporated communities, while roughly half of the region’s schools fall near the bottom of their class.

The 2022 Best High Schools list, compiled by U.S. News & World Report and North Carolina-based think tank RTI International, took a different approach than in past years to account for COVID-19 and government-ordered shutdowns. Previous lists drew from the latest state testing scores in a given school year, but this list’s point of reference was the 2019-2020 year, when the U.S. Department of Education allowed states to forgo standardized testing. In turn, the new rankings rely on “historic assessment data from the three prior ranking years while also incorporating, for the first time, state science assessment data from the 2018-2019 school year,” U.S. News states on its website.

The top rank among all High Desert institutions went to University Preparatory School, at 13853 Seneca Road in Victorville, which ranked 297th in the nation with 713 students enrolled in grades nine through 12. That placed it in the top 2% of all U.S. high schools and was the 35th best mark in California, out of nearly 2,600 ranked schools in the state.

The strongest aspect of University Prep’s score was a 94% on reading proficiency, based on the relative success of its students on past reading assessments. It scored lower on math proficiency at 59%, and science proficiency at 52%. Its second-best metric was the percentage of its student body that took at least one AP exam, at 90%, while 73% of its students actually passed at least one AP exam.

University Prep logged a graduation rate of 66% and a college-readiness rating — which is based on how many grade 12 students took and passed AP or IB exams — of 77.5 in the 2019-2020 school year.

A total of 13 high schools in the High Desert made the top 50% of ranked schools, while 22 others fell in the bottom half of the nationwide rankings.

Among those in the lower half, 17 High Desert schools fell into the bottom 25%. Instead of getting an individual ranking, each school at this level was given the same rank of “13,383-17,843.”

The Academy for Academic Excellence, a K-12 charter school in Apple Valley operated by the Lewis Center for Educational Research, came out with the second-best rank in the High Desert at 1,966th nationwide and 280th in California. With 436 high-school grade enrollees in the 2019-2020 school year, the academy logged a graduation rate of 99% and a college-readiness rating of 38.

The region’s third-best rank went to another Victorville-based high school, the Cobalt Institute of Math and Science Academy, with a total of 732 enrollees, a graduation rate of 69% and a college-readiness rating of just under 41.

High schools in some sparsely-populated, unincorporated communities also shined above most of their High Desert peers.

Serrano High School in Phelan was graded as the fourth-best school in the region, ranking 3,818th nationwide and 568th in California.

Part of the Snowline Joint Unified School District, Serrano mostly serves students from Phelan, Pinon Hills and Wrightwood. It logged 2,073 high-school enrollees in the 2019-20 school year with a 96% graduation rate and a 25.9 college-readiness rating.

The fifth-best ranked school in the High Desert, Silver Valley High School, lies in another unincorporated community: Yermo.

With 341 high-school enrollees, most of whom come from military families at nearby bases like Fort Irwin and the Marine Corps Logistics Base in Barstow, the school recorded a 100% graduation rate and a 24.4 college-readiness rating. It is also one of seven schools in the Silver Valley Unified School District that were honored earlier this year as California Purple Star Schools, a state designation for schools “committed and equipped to meet the unique needs of military-connected students and their families.”

Two more unincorporated communities were highlighted with Oak Hills High School pulling the region’s sixth-best ranking, and the Academy of Careers and Exploration in Helendale ranking as the seventh-best high school.

Hesperia is home to three other High Desert high schools that made the upper half of the U.S. rankings: Sultana High School, Hesperia High School and Encore Jr./Sr. High for the Performing and Visual Arts School.

Some large schools in the area fared less impressively.

Adelanto High School, with 1,927 high-school enrollees, fell in the bottom quarter of U.S. high schools with a 52% graduation rate and a 15.5 college-readiness rating. Barstow High School ranked slightly better, but was still close to the bottom quarter, with 1,470 enrollees and a college-readiness rating of just 5.5, which countered its strong graduation rate of 94%.

The two largest schools in Victorville — Silverado High School, with 2,209 enrollees, and Victor Valley High School, with 1,916 enrollees — also ranked relatively poorly. Each school logged graduation rates just a couple ticks above 50% and college-readiness ratings below 20.

The third-largest high school in Victorville, the 1,450-enrollee Excelsior Charter, also fell in the bottom quarter of U.S. high schools. It logged a 94% graduation rate but no college-readiness rating, presumably meaning none of its students took AP or IB exams, and was bogged down by low scores for math and science proficiency.

Update/Editor's Note: Kris Reilly, a spokesperson for Victor Valley Union High School District – which oversees 10 schools including University Prep, Cobalt Institute, Adelanto High, Silverado and Victor Valley High – told the Daily Press “an error in reporting by our district” caused the 2019-2020 graduation rates of its high schools to be abnormally low in government data.

“Unadjusted totals were used, and the unadjusted totals do not account for students who move away, transfer, etc. – they are simply counted as dropouts,” he wrote in an email. “This badly skewed our data for one academic year.”

Reilly pointed to state data that shows the Victor Valley districtwide graduation rate rising in the three prior years from 67% to 75%, then dropping in the 2019-2020 year to 49%, then rising again in the most recent year to 78%.

Charlie McGee covers California’s High Desert for the Daily Press, focusing on the city of Barstow and its surrounding communities. He is also a Report for America corps member with The GroundTruth Project, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization dedicated to supporting the next generation of journalists in the U.S. and around the world. McGee may be reached at 760-955-5341 or cmcgee@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @bycharliemcgee.

This article originally appeared on Victorville Daily Press: 2022 rankings: A few High Desert high schools shine, half score poorly