Shorecrest, Shorewood listed among top high schools in national rankings

Shorecrest High School 2015
Photo by Steven H. Robinson

Shorecrest and Shorewood High Schools have been recognized for student achievement in two recent prestigious national rankings.

Shorecrest has been awarded a silver medal for the fourth consecutive year for U.S. News and World Report's 2015 ranking of the Best High Schools. 

Shorecrest is ranked 14th in Washington by U.S. News out of 458 high schools in the state, and 739th in America out of more than 29,000 high schools. Last year Shorecrest ranked 19th in the state. Shorecrest will again receive silver medal status for its academic achievement. U.S. News awarded gold, silver, and bronze medals to the top-performing schools.

U.S. News Best High Schools ranking information for Shorecrest

Shorewood is ranked 25th in the state in the 2015 rankings of America’s Most Challenging High Schools by The Washington Post.

America's Most Challenging High Schools ranking for Shorewood

Both rankings heavily weight school performance in AP (Advance Placement) courses. Shoreline Schools offers 19 AP courses to students this year.

America’s Most Challenging High Schools ranks schools through an index formula that’s a simple ratio: the number of Advanced Placement tests given at a school each year, divided by the number of seniors who graduated that year. A ratio of 1.000 means the school had as many tests as graduates.

To create the 2015 Best High Schools rankings, U.S. News worked with RTI International, a North Carolina-based research firm. High schools were evaluated in three stages.

First, U.S. News looked at overall student performance on state-required tests. Schools had to perform better than average to pass, but because of a slight change to the methodology this year, more schools qualified for the rankings. 

Then, U.S. News factored in how effectively schools educated their low-income and minority students. Finally, schools were assessed on how well they prepared students for college.

High schools that made it through this analysis were then eligible to be ranked nationally, in terms of college readiness. U.S. News determines the degree to which schools prepare students for college-level work by analyzing student success in Advanced Placement (AP) which includes college-level courses.