In total, 17.9% of Rhode Island public high schools received a gold or silver award. The state had two schools earn gold awards, including Classical (which was RI’s top-ranked high school) and Barrington High School. Rounding out Rhode Island’s top 10 ranked schools were Portsmouth High, East Greenwich High, North Kingstown Senior High, Lincoln Senior High, Middletown High, Narragansett High, Chariho High, and Mt. Hope High.
In order to produce the rankings, U.S. News & World Report enlisted the help of RTI International, a global nonprofit science research firm based in North Carolina. Together, they implemented a comprehensive methodology for evaluating the schools based on two key principals:
1. A great high school must serve all of its students well, not just those who are college bound.
2. It must be able to produce measurable academic outcomes to show it is successfully educating its student body across a range of performance indicators.
The evaluation started with 28,561 public high schools across the nation. After eliminating schools that were deemed too small to be analyzed, the group was reduced to 19,908 schools which had a high enough enrollment during the 2013-2014 school year. The final state-by-state rankings were calculated by percentage of gold and silver award medal schools (bronze medals were not factored into the rankings). In the end, Maryland was ranked #1 in the nation for the second year in a row, boasting an impressive 28.9% of its schools earning gold or silver medals.
For more information on the rankings, click the following links: Overall State Rankings / Rhode Island School Rankings / Overall School Rankings
