Mom makes sure the right Barrington HS is on Newsweek's list
Barrington High School can thank an alert mother for making sure it was included on a list of the best high schools in the country.
A Newsweek subscriber, Kelley Smith always likes to see where Barrington ranks on the magazine's annual list of top public high schools.
When she took a glance at the online rankings, Barrington was nowhere to be found -- Barrington, Ill., that is.
"I printed out the list and read through it on the train Monday and saw there was a Barrington, R.I.," ranked at No. 542, Smith said.
More Coverage Links Newsweek's Best High Schools List
She did some research and found that while her local Barrington High had made the ranking the past three years, its East Coast namesake never had.
So Smith wrote to Newsweek Tuesday morning and said editors there told her they'd check it out.
"Tuesday afternoon, Newsweek wrote back and said, 'Whoops,'" Smith said.
Staffers told her it had been a computer glitch and that all the information on the Web site was correct -- except for the state.
"It was a nice piece of sleuthing on her part," Barrington High Principal Emil Rode said.
In DuPage County, Naperville North, Naperville Central and Neuqua Valley high schools mistakenly were left off the list of 1,305 schools the magazine released earlier this week. The author of the Newsweek report said other schools from across the country also may be missing from the initial list and a revised ranking will be placed on the magazine's Web site next week.
The rankings are based on a formula that tallies the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests taken by students in 2007, divided by the number of graduating seniors.
Rode said Barrington has put a lot of emphasis on its AP program in the past several years.
"This affirms those efforts," Rode said of the ranking.
Jay Mathews, the Newsweek contributing editor and Washington Post education columnist who devised the ranking formula, said over the past few years, about 50 to 75 schools are typically added to the lists after they are published. This year, 33 schools already have proven they qualify but were left out.
When ranking schools, Newsweek sends out forms for school officials to fill out regarding AP tests, Mathews said. Sometimes they are mistakenly addressed to people who are no longer at the school. Other times the person who receives it may get caught up in other work and forget to fill it out.
Small schools sometimes get left out, too, Mathews said. Their low number of seniors may result in a small number of AP tests and therefore they don't always show up in the databases Newsweek accesses even though they qualify to be on the list.
"For many reasons I love the Web and one of them is the Web allows me to put on top of our new list that comes out on the Newsweek Web site an invitation for anyone we may have missed to get back to us," Mathews said.
Some also may have been wondering why the Illinois Math and Science Academy is also not on the list. Newsweek didn't forget the Aurora school; it instead filed it under "The Public Elites."
Arlington Heights' Hersey High made the list at No. 467. Principal Tina Cantrell pointed to the school's work to improve its curriculum.
"Obviously, we are thrilled," she said.
Palatine-Schaumburg High School District 211 Superintendent Roger Thornton also said he was thrilled to see four of its schools make the rankings.
"The quality of education in this area is superb for students," Thornton said.
Tucson, Ariz.'s Basis Charter School topped the list. The highest-ranked Illinois school was Northside College Prep in Chicago at No. 14.
Newsweek's top U.S. high schools
The magazine has released its list of the top 1,300 U.S. public high schools. Here's how area schools ranked in the country and state.
School U.S. State
rank rank
Stevenson 150 4
Hersey 467 9
Barrington 542 12
Buffalo Grove 735 17
Maine South 840 21
Fremd 919 23
Prospect 948 25
Conant 1,015 26
Palatine 1,102 29
Schaumburg 1,125 31
Source: www.newsweek.com