The Best Public High Schools in Greater Boston
This year’s rankings offer a statistical analysis of the top high schools in the Greater Boston area. To ensure accuracy and consistency, it is compiled with the most recent available data at press time from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, which publishes a limited amount of information on each school, including MCAS and SAT scores. At a time when the opportunity gap in schools is top of mind, there is increased scrutiny over the factoring of test scores, which tend to be correlated with higher family incomes and are increasingly regarded as an inadequate measure of student achievement. In an effort to provide additional transparency, this year’s chart also includes median household income and home prices for each high school’s town(s) so you can see for yourself how the schools at the top of the list stack up. We have also included several “Honor Roll” lists so you can see in what areas, exactly, different schools excel, as well as a list of high-performing schools in areas with lower median home prices.
Top 150 Public High Schools
Methodology: This chart ranks public high schools in towns or districts within, or partially within, I-495. In cases of missing information, we used data from a previous year as necessary. In some cases where no data was available, a value equal to the weighted average of the school’s other categories was used. We omitted highly specialized schools and schools reporting insufficient information, as well as charter schools. 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” to determine each high school’s rank. Median home prices, provided by the Mass-achusetts Association of Realtors and MLS Property Information Network, are from 2020; median household incomes, from the Census’s American Community Survey, are from 2015 to 2019 and reflect 2019 dollars. For schools that serve multiple cities or towns, a weighted average for median home price and median household income was created based on the population of each. Neither of these data points factored into a school’s overall ranking.
The Honor Roll
Schools are listed in descending order, with the best-performing at the top, unless otherwise noted.
Average Class Size
Bang for Your Housing Buck
For this chart, we selected the 10 institutions whose high school rankings most significantly surpassed the ranking of their respective median home price and listed them here alphabetically.