The Best Public High Schools in Greater Boston, 2022
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 data available 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. As the challenges of the pandemic continue to amplify the opportunity gap in education, there has been 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 again 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 compare. 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.
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 Massachusetts Association of Realtors and MLS Property Information Network, are from 2021; median household incomes, from the Census’s American Community Survey, are from 2016 to 2020 and reflect 2020 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
The report cards are in: Here are the top high schools in four different subjects.
Average Class Size
Bang for Your Housing Buck
For this chart, we selected the institutions whose high school rankings most significantly surpassed the ranking of their respective median home price and listed them here alphabetically.
Student-to-Teacher Ratio
Percent of Teachers with Exemplary Rating
Research by Isabelle Durso, Tomás Gonzalez, and Meaghan MacDonald