Rank and File

Newsweek has taken a momentary break from deifying President Obama to publish their list of the Top 1500 public high schools in America:

Public schools are ranked according to a ratio devised by Jay Mathews: the number of Advanced Placement, Intl. Baccalaureate and/or Cambridge tests taken by all students at a school in 2008 divided by the number of graduating seniors. All of the schools on the list have an index of at least 1.000; they are in the top 6 percent of public schools measured this way.

I was curious to see how our local schools stacked up. This year, twenty-eight Minnesota public high schools made the cut:

105 St. Louis Park
108 Edina
227 Southwest Minneapolis
491 St. Anthony Village
529 South Minneapolis
588 Eastview Apple Valley
630 Como Park St. Paul
640 Mahtomedi
734 Patrick Henry Minneapolis
744 Minnetonka
823 Lakeville North
833 Central St. Paul
912 Irondale New Brighton
939 Wayzata
954 Century Rochester
1045 Eden Prairie
1095 Simley Inver Grove Heights
1117 Moorhead
1120 Hopkins
1180 North St. Paul
1238 Stillwater Area
1258 South St. Paul
1270 Eagan
1279 Prior Lake
1309 Sibley West St. Paul
1398 Mounds View Arden Hills
1399 Robbinsdale Cooper New Hope
1475 Mankato West

A couple of things from the list stand out. The first is that there are only three schools from outside the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area (which reflecting a nationwide pattern). The second is that it seems like most of the metro area high schools made the list. I don't know how many public high schools there are total in the metro area (a few minutes spent Googling for that number proved fruitless), but if twenty-five made the list it would almost seem more newsworthy to note those that didn't.