Rather than publishing link-bait headlines and an article that reads like a press release from US News and World Reports, I wish that Patch had dug into the ranking methodology to see whether it is meaningful.

Below is my analysis of the methodology which is published online at:
http://www.usnews.com/pubfiles/Identifying_Top_Performing_High_Schools_May2012.pdf

I'll have to break it into pieces since comment length is limited.

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Here are the ranking criteria:

"…These rankings are based on three aspects of school performance: the performance of all students on state assessments in reading and mathematics; the performance of the disadvantaged student subgroups—defined as Black/African-American, Hispanic/Latino, or economically disadvantaged students—on these assessments; and the degree to which high schools prepare students for college by offering a college-level curriculum."

"Step 1 of the “Best High Schools” method identified high schools that performed better than expected on state reading and mathematics assessments, given the proportion of students
in the high school identified as economically disadvantaged. To pass Step 1, high schools with higher proportions of economically disadvantaged students needed lower school-average achievement than high schools with lower proportions of economically disadvantaged students."

"Step 2 identified high schools in which disadvantaged students—defined as Black/African- American, Hispanic/Latino, or economically disadvantaged as determined by state criteria (often defined as students eligible for free or reduced price lunch through the National School Lunch Program)—had combined reading and mathematics proficiency levels that were at least equal to the state’s combined reading and mathematics proficiency levels for those disadvantaged student groups."

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"…A quality-adjusted AP/IB participation rate was created for each high school by calculating the percentage of 12th graders who passed at least one AP or IB exam at some point during high school. Passing rates for this analysis were 3 or higher for AP exams and 4 or higher for IB exams."

Kind of hard for New Trier to rank highly given the skew toward "disadvantaged" students in the first two measures.

The "college readiness" measure is much too blunt. Participating in an AP class increases the measure regardless of whether the participant passed the AP exam. Moreover, the ability portion of the measure reflects only whether the student passed or failed. If the same number of students all scored a "3" as scored a "5" at an other school, the two schools would have the same ability contribution to College Readiness.

The rankings are just a way to keep US News & World Reports afloat.

Quit making excuses Nello, New Trier is just not as good as you think. And even if you removed "disadvantaged" impact from the analysis and then compared schools on "non-disadvantaged" then New Trier would come out even lower. Sorry Nelly.