The Best Public High Schools in Greater Boston, Ranked for 2023
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About this year’s list
The 2023 rankings offer a statistical analysis of the top public high schools in Greater Boston. 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. 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). 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. To compile the list, we used the most recent data for each school available at presstime from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. 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 a 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 2022; median household incomes, from the Census’s American Community Survey, are from 2017 to 2021 and reflect 2021 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 town. Neither of these data points factored into a school’s overall ranking. We considered it more desirable to have a smaller class size and a lower student-to-teacher ratio.
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 Anna Arriaga and Isabelle Durso
First published in the print edition of the September 2023 issue.