Best Public High Schools in Boston 2016
In our 2016 best schools issue, we explore the pros and cons of charter schools, a hot topic on this year’s ballot. As the fight between the pro-charter and anti-charter faithful reaches a fever pitch, what do the numbers say? For our annual rankings this year, we crunched the numbers on both Boston’s traditional public high schools (shown here) and the area’s charter schools. As always, sort the charts by what matters most to you: class size, student-to-teacher ratio, test scores, and so on. (Methodology and sources below.)
Correction, September 14, 2016: Andover High School has 8.5 college counselors and 31 varsity teams, Oliver Ames High School has 29 varsity sports teams, and Newton North has 13 college counselors.
METHODOLOGY: This chart ranks public high schools in towns or districts that lie within, or partially within, I-495. To compile the list, we used the most recent data for each school available at press time from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary & Secondary Education and, in certain instances, information self-reported by the schools. In cases of missing information, we used data from a previous year when necessary. We omitted highly specialized schools and schools reporting insufficient information. To calculate the rankings, statistician George Recck, director of the Math Resource Center at Babson College, analyzed the results, comparing each high school’s data points to the overall average for all schools. He then applied a percentage weight to the standardized value for each school to create an aggregate “score,” and used this score to determine each high school’s rank. We considered it more desirable to have a smaller class size, a lower student-to-teacher ratio, and fewer students per college counselor and sports team.
Research by Alene Bouranova, Paola Cigui, Carolyn Freeman, Grace Gulino, Madeleine Maher, Olivia Paradice, and Samantha Pitkin