The Newsweek High School Rankings for 2015 have been released, and Carroll High School has made the list at No. 145 of 500. That puts your Dragons in the top 30 percent in the country. The rankings assess schools based on a broad range of data to determine which institutions do the best job of preparing students for college.
The list also ranks schools within their respective states, with Carroll coming in at 10th in Texas.
The first school in the state on the overall rankings was Dallas' School For The Talented And Gifted, coming in at 36th. It has a college readiness score of 88 percent, a 100 percent graduation rate and 98.2 percent of students are college bound.
Carroll has an 82.7 percent college readiness score, a 100 percent graduation rate, and 95.1 percent of students are college bound.
Other Texas schools of note:
- Cedar Hill Collegiate (76)
- DeBakey High School For Health Professions (91)
- Westlake (106)
- Clements (108)
- Highland Park (112)
- Transmountain Early College High School (125)
- Plano West (130)
- Carnegie Vanguard (143)
In collaboration with research partner Westat, Newsweek developed a three-step methodology for our High School Rankings (information courtesy ofNewsweek):
Short List Analysis: "First, we evaluated the universe of regular public high schools based on their proficiency rates on standardized state-level math and reading/language arts assessments, using the proficiency rates to create a high school achievement index for each school. For the absolute list, the index was used to identify high schools that perform at or above the 70th percentile within each state. For the relative list, the index was used to identify high schools that perform 0.5 standard deviations or more than their state’s average when accounting for students’ socioeconomic status as reflected by the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch..."
Ranking Analysis: "We surveyed the high schools on both lists identified in the short list analysis for college-readiness data. For those high schools that participated in our survey, we created a weighted College Readiness Index based on the following six indicators:
- College Enrollment Rate—25 percent
- Graduation Rate—20 percent
- Weighted AP/IB/Dual Enrollment composite—17.5 percent
- Weighted SAT/ACT composite—17.5 percent
- Student Retention (change in student enrollment between 9th and 12th grades; this measure is intended to control for dropout rates)—10 percent
- Counselor-to-Student Ratio—10 percent
"For the absolute rankings, we rank-ordered the schools by their College Readiness Index scores... For the relative list, we controlled for student poverty levels ... we then ranked the schools based on how well they performed relative to the average relationship between schools' college readiness index scores and percentage of economically disadvantaged students, indicated by the line of best fit..."
Equity (Gold Star) Analysis: "Within the top high schools identified in the ranking analysis, we then identified schools in which economically disadvantaged students performed at or above the state average for all students on standardized state reading/language arts and mathematics assessments. This part of the analysis did not affect the rankings. Instead, we incorporated this step to recognize schools that have equitable academic performance for economically disadvantaged students as indicated by their performance levels relative to the state average for all students on both the R/LA and mathematics assessments. These schools are marked with a gold star on our ranking lists.*
" *A large number of schools did not have sufficient data available from the National Center for Education Statistics to be included in our equity analysis."
A star next to a school’s name on the master list indicates that it meets our Equity measure by helping low-income students score at or above average on state assessments.
For the full list, click here.