Newsweek just published its annual list of top public high schools in the United States. Preuss UCSD of San Diego (rank #10) and  Oxford Academy of Cypress (rank #16) took the top two spots in California. Find to full list here.

The exclusion of Whitney High of Cerritos (our #1 rank school in FTS) was explained in their Methodology/FAQ section (Question 6). Definitely check out this section as Newsweek uses very different ranking criteria as FindTopSchools (FTS).

Lastly, the FAQ section highlights a few points that we at FTS find particularly interesting:

• Academic performance data is not standardized and centralized on a national level. Even Newsweek faces many of the same data collection issues that FTS does. This is also one of the reasons why FTS have not rolled out to a national level.
• “There are many ways to skin a cat” (btw, FTS does not endorse the practice of cat skinning), there are many ways to “rank” schools as well. Which ranking criteria to use is, by and large, a subjective choice as demonstrated by Question 5 & 7. Therefore rankings (Newsweek or ours) are great for discoveries and springboards for researches, but rankings should not be used as the be-all & end-all measures in order to decide the right schools. (This is a PSA brought to you by the FTS CYA department.)
• Wouldn’t it be great if we can compare public and private schools side by side? We would love it and so would Newsweek. Question 11 tells us why we can’t.

Tags: news

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