Understanding U.S. News & World Report Rankings

24 CIEE schools and districts were  recently recognized in the  2017 Best School List published by U.S. News & World Report.   This week, we’re going to teach you more about the public high school ranking system and what U.S. News & World Report uses to measure performance at schools. There are dozens of state and nationally ranked public high schools in our catalog, so please contact CIEE to learn more about these prestigious options for your students!

 U.S. News & World Report surveys high schools constantly and provides consumers with a snap shot of all of the public high schools in the U.S. They collect extensive amounts of data and rank high schools in four tiers:

• Gold Medal
• Silver Medal
• Bronze Medal
• National Recognition

In addition to these distinctions, they also provide a numerical rank:

• A Gold Medal school is one that is a top 500 school in the U.S. in terms of preparing students for college and meeting other criteria.
• A Silver Medal school is what they call a  “high performing” school falling just below the Gold Medal line.
• A Bronze Medal school is a high performing school based on how students perform on state exams.

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Earning any of these three distinctions is an enormous honor for a high school, as there are thousands of schools in the U.S. vying for a spot on this list. Looking at the distribution of these honors, U.S. News & World Report recently released a survey showing that only 2.4% of all high schools in the U.S. earned a Gold Medal distinction, 10.3% earned the Silver Medal distinction and 16.8% for the Bronze Medal distinction. Schools that did not earn a medal accounted for 70.5%.

U.S. News & World Report  also disclosed further information about how they determine these annual awards, based on four unique steps:

1. Step One looks at the reading and math results for each state, but also considers  what factor of students are attending the school that are economically disadvantaged (and may score lower).
2. Step Two looks at how disadvantaged students perform at the school as compared to state wide results.  
3. Step Three assesses graduation rates at schools compared to country wide graduation rates. Schools that had graduation rates of 75% or lower were not considered for these top distinctions.
4. Step Four accounts for the rigor of the curriculum (for example, how many AP classes are offered and pass rates on exams). At CIEE, when we ask high schools to work with us to enroll international students, we consider all of these factors!

We are proud to carry some of the best high schools in the U.S. and offer top notch experiences for your students. ​We carry several Gold Medal schools which rank at the top 2.4% in the country.  Some examples of our top Medal schools include:

• Miami-Dade County Public Schools
• Falmouth High School
• Hopkinton High School
• Montpelier High School
• Concord Carlisle High School
•  Paradise Valley Unified District 
• Los Angeles Unified School District
• Scottsdale Unified School District

To learn more about rank and searching for public high schools, you can visit U.S. News &World Reports website  or read the full article announcing the 2017 rankings.