What's Changed in the 2022 Best High Schools Rankings
Categories: US Education News
While the six positioning pointers and their loads were equivalent to those utilized in the three earlier years, U.S. News changed its computations to represent the effect that the Coronavirus pandemic had on schools in the 2019-20 school year. With most states closing schools for eye to eye direction beginning in Walk 2020 - not well before states consistently direct examinations - the U.S. Part of Guidance surrendered waivers allowing all states to forego state testing for the 2019-20 school year.
Specifically, an ordinary of the following years and insightful subjects were used: 2016-2017 math and scrutinizing assessment data; 2017-18 math and examining examination data; and 2018-19 math, examining and science evaluation data.
Arizona, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Michigan and Tennessee had only math and reading data factored all three years. All states except for those six had science tests added for 2018-2019.Graduation rates and the three ranking indicators pertaining to college readiness (12th graders participating in and scoring highly on AP and IB exams) incorporated data exclusively from 2019-2020 cohorts. This means 50% of the ranking calculations used completely new data.
The primary reason for a school's rise or fall in the 2022 Best High Schools rankings pertained to performance on the six ranking indicators. This is especially true with college readiness ranking indicators because of their significant weight in the ranking and the fact that they were composed of entirely new data.
Performance on state assessments could also explain change; however, because this year's rankings averaged assessment data applied toward prior rankings, the inclusion of 2018-2019 state science assessments into the calculations facilitated more movement than if this edition's ranking had only used prior math and reading data.
Finally, when ranking approximately 17,840 public high schools, a minimalistic difference in scoring can still result in what appears to be a large change in rank. For example, a school dropping 50 places nationally may sound like a large loss, but actually means that less than 0.3% of schools in the United States surpassed that school's position.
Looked at another way, if a school's overall score rose by 1 point from 97 in 2021 to 98 in 2022, it would rise in the rankings by about 178 places. If a school's score fell by half a point from 97 in 2021 to 96.5 in 2022, it would fall by around 89 places in the rankings.