In the News

Oregon high schools make magazine list

by The Oregonian Saturday December 01, 2007, 12:14 PM

Among the silver and bronze honors, the Beaverton School District's Arts & Communication Magnet Academy is ranked the state's best

The first high school rankings by U.S. News and World Report, released Friday, say that Oregon doesn't have any of the nation's 100 best high schools -- but it has a lot that rate as silver or bronze, a designation given to just 1 percent of high schools nationwide.

Best in Oregon, by the magazine's number-crunching, is Beaverton's Arts & Communication Magnet Academy . It was one of eight Oregon schools to get a coveted silver rating, putting them among the 500 top-performing high schools in the nation, as judged by the magazine.

U.S News rates schools high if they have high state test scores compared with schools with similar levels of student poverty and if their minority and low-income students outscore statewide averages for those groups -- something Arts & Comm students did by a long stretch.

The third and final aspect of the magazine's judging: Did the school have a lot of its students take, and pass, Advanced Placement tests?

The other seven Oregon high schools that rated silver, in part by their strong AP results: Lakeridge High, South Eugene, West Linn, Corvallis, Crescent Valley, Ashland and Waldport.

Lincoln High also would have earned a silver rating if the magazine had counted International Baccalaureate scores alongside AP. But the magazine and its partners at Standard & Poor, which did the number-crunching on the 2005-06 scores, couldn't get access to IB test results for every U.S. high school, a U.S. News spokesman said.

Schools with strong test scores with a small or non-existent AP program got the magazine's bronze designation. In that category, U.S. News went wild over the performance of a host of very small rural Oregon schools, including Jordan Valley High (six sophomores, the only high school students who take state tests), Wheeler High (seven sophomores), Harper School (eight), Spray School (nine) and Helix School (10).

Other, bigger schools that earned a bronze rating for their high scores include Lincoln, Newberg High, Beaverton's Sci & Tech magnet school, Portland's Metropolitan Learning Center and Forest Grove High. In Washington, Vancouver's School of Arts & Academics rated silver.

The very best high school in the country is Thomas Jefferson High in Alexandria, Va., where every student took and passed at least one AP exam. Two Washington high schools made the gold list: International Community School in Kirkland (No. 17 in the nation) and Newport High in Bellevue (No. 44).

-- Betsy Hammond; betsyhammond@news.oregonian.com