HISD Gets Six High Schools On A National Magazine's "Best" List

By Richard Connelly Fri., Dec. 11 2009 at 11:02 AM

Categories: Education

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US News & World Report has put out its list of best high schools in the nation, and HISD is (deservedly) crowing that six of its schools have been named.

(Should we mention that it took three tries for the HISD news office to get it right? No, that would be a cheap shot.) (Oops.)

And the USNWRee goes to.....In the top 100, the two schools everyone would guess: Carnegie Vanguard and DeBakey. Snoooze.

In the top 561 (don't ask) were Challenge Early College High School, The High School for Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice and the High School for Performing and Visual Arts. Eastwood Academy also made the list, lower down.

HISD supe Terry Grier said, " "I am extremely proud of these five schools. All of them have all made this list for multiple years which speaks volumes about continuing excellence. I look forward to more HISD High Schools joining these schools on the list. We have several that I believe are strong contenders." (Note: This quote, about "five" schools, was included on the updated press release that said it was actually six schools named. So we asssume Grier is not proud, or at least not "extremely proud," of one of the named schools. We're going with DeBakey, since their football team sucks.)

These lists, for whatever level of education, are always dependent on methodology and are never the last work on anything. For what it's worth, here's HISD describing USWNR's method:

U.S. News and World Report uses a formula produced in collaboration with School Evaluation Services, a K-12 data research and analysis business run by Standard & Poor's. The magazine put 18,743 high schools in 49 states through a three-step analysis. First, they measure how each school's students performed on state tests, adjusting for student circumstances. They next evaluate how well each school's disadvantaged students did. Finally, they look at whether the school was successful in providing college-level coursework.

Congrats to the schools.

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