AMSA, which for nearly a decade did not drop below the top five in the U.S. News and World Report’s Massachusetts Best High Schools rankings, fell to No. 7 for the 2023-2024 school year.
The Boston Latin School maintained its perennial top spot — the oldest high school in the nation is also an exam school — while Pioneer Valley Chinese Immersion Charter School ranked second. This is the first time the school has been in the top 10.
Schools near AMSA, including The Bromfield School (third) and Acton-Boxborough Regional High School (ninth) made the top 10.
AMSA’s previous lowest ranking was fourth, where the school placed in 2015 and 2020. AMSA was ranked second last year.
The questions are obvious: Are the rankings to be taken seriously and, if so, how concerned should the school and community be about the drop?
“Is it nice to have these rankings? Yeah, obviously it doesn’t hurt, it looks great,” AMSA Principal Mike Nawrocki said. “But, you know, it’s truly not something that I would lose sleep over.”
AMSA has fallen out of the top five ranked schools in Massachusetts for the first time. (Graphic by Maya Grgurevich)AMSA has consistently ranked No. 2 or No. 3 in recent years, so what can account for this drastic rank drop?
U.S. News and World Report takes six factors into account for its rankings: college readiness, college curriculum breadth, state assessment proficiency, state assessment performance, underserved student performance, and graduation rate.
Each of these factors has different percentage weights, with the largest percentage placed on college readiness (30 percent). The weighted percentages of all six factors are combined into one score on a zero to 100 scale, which determines the school’s overall performance.
AMSA’s overall score was a 98.57 this year.
While U.S. News and World Report has maintained the percentage weight of the six factors over the years, the most recent data available for state testing was from the 2020-2021 school year.
This altered the methodology. Depending on the school’s participation in testing for the 2020-2021 school year, either the data was taken solely from 2021, averaged from 2019 and 2021, or only taken from 2019.
For AMSA, U.S. News and World Report averaged the state testing data from 2019 and 2021.
The 2020-2021 school year was mostly virtual, due to the covid pandemic. This likely affected student performance in state testing (although this is also true of all schools in the commonwealth), so the data from 2021 may not be an accurate representation of school and student performance.
Should AMSA’s ranking remain the same or drop again next year, sleep may well be lost.
