U.S. News & World Report has released its list of America’s Best High Schools. In order to create its list, U.S. News worked with School Evaluation Services, which is a K-12 education and data research and analysis business, to obtain information from over 21,000 public high schools.

_{The Charter School of Wilmington received another Gold Medal for 2010. (Wilmington, Delaware)}

After evaluating the high schools, U.S. News & World Report placed the top schools into four different categories: gold, silver, bronze and honorable mention. To determine the proper categories for the schools, U.S. News followed a three-step process. The first two steps focused on whether or not the schools were serving their students well. This was determined by performance on standardized testing and other measures used to evaluate whether or not state proficiency standards and benchmarks are being met. Those schools that successfully passed through the first two steps were then assessed based upon how well the schools are preparing students for college-level work.

It should be noted that the test performance was evaluated by comparing the schools to the average student in that particular state. Furthermore, other factors were considered when evaluating performance, including considering the percentage of economically disadvantaged students in the school. After passing through this first step, U.S. News then evaluated whether or not the least-advantaged students in the school were performing better than the average when compared to similar students in the state.

For the third step, U.S. News took a closer look at the percentage of students who took Advance Placement (AP) tests as well as how many actually passed those tests. When all of the data was crunched, the high schools were ranked on a national level. The top 100 high schools on the list were placed in the gold medal category while the next 461 schools were awarded with silver medals. Bronze medals were awarded to 1,189 schools that passed the first two steps and 37 schools were awarded honorable mentions because their college readiness index would have been high enough for a gold medal, but they failed to meet the qualifications to pass steps one and two.

If you want to see if your school met the list or if you want to check out the rankings of other schools in your area or even in another state, visit the U.S. News Website and select the state you are interested in and scroll through the alphabetical list of results.