article
A Minnesota high school, often associated with college sports as a ceremony, held its own signing ceremony to celebrate students embarking on different paths.
(FOX 9) – U.S. News & World Report released its annual “Best High Schools Rankings” for the 2024 class last week.
The rankings, which cover more than 20,000 public high schools across the U.S., are based on factors including college readiness, state assessment capabilities, state assessment performance, achievement of underserved students (i.e., students from low-income or students of color), number of students earning passing grades in college-level courses, and graduation rates.
As for Minnesota, the situation was not as good, with no high schools ranked in the top 100 state high schools and only 13 in the top 1,000. By comparison, Wisconsin also failed to rank in the top 100, and Iowa only had one school in the top 700 and two in the top 1,000.
In the Midwest, Illinois, Michigan and Indiana outperformed Minnesota, with schools from each state ranking in the top 10.
The first Minnesota school on the list is Mathematics and Science Academy in Woodbury, ranked 120th. Nineteen states did not have at least one school in the top 120: Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming.
Several states had multiple schools ranked in the top 50, including Arizona (6 schools), California (6 schools), New York (5 schools) and Texas (6 schools).
All of Minnesota's top 10 schools are located in the Twin Cities metropolitan area.
Math and Science Academy, 120th overall (Woodbury, Minn.), Nova Classical Academy Upper School, 179th overall (St. Paul, Minn.), Ste. Croix Preparatory Academy, 190th Overall (Baytown, MN), Parnassus Prep School – Rhetoric, 262nd Overall (Maple Grove, MN), Minnetonka Senior High School, 276th Overall (Minnetonka, MN), Edina Senior High School, 302nd Overall (Edina, MN), Wayzata High School, 377th Overall (Plymouth, MN), Mounds View Senior High School, 576th Overall (Arden Hills, MN), Eagle Ridge Academy Charter School, 636th Overall (Minnetonka, MN), Lakes International Language Academy – Headwaters, 731st Overall (Forest Lake, MN)
Criticism of the US News rankings
Like many rankings, the U.S. News list has come under heavy criticism from critics in the education community.
The overall theme is that ranking systems are simplistic: It's hard to judge a school's overall quality based on just a few criteria, and U.S. News' method is probably too simplistic.
In recent years, dozens of universities have stopped providing data to US News because they believe the system is flawed. In 2022, Yale Law School, which has always held the top spot in law school rankings, stopped providing data. In a letter, the school's dean Heather Gerken wrote, “In recent years, we have invested significant energy and capital in important efforts to make our law school a better place, yet our scores have paradoxically worked to lower our scores. That's because the US News rankings are deeply flawed. They undermine programs that support public interest careers, promote need-based aid, and welcome working-class students into the profession. We have reached a point where the rankings process undermines the core responsibilities of the legal profession. As a result, we will no longer participate.”
The National Education Policy Center, a nonprofit at the University of Colorado Boulder, also criticized the college and high school rankings. The center said that while there are differences in how U.S. News compiles its high school rankings, its methodology is also flawed.
“The U.S. News rankings oversimplify academic quality by combining a wide range of school quality factors into a single number,” the center wrote in a blog post. “Because U.S. News attempts to rank by quantity with inadequate research resources, its criteria fail to capture the nuances of complex institutions, and differences in school rankings are not based on statistically significant differences.”