The Best Schools (For You and Your Kid)

Public versus private. It's an age-old debate in these parts, but today parents all over the Hub are reexamining their long-held assumptions about what's best for their kids.


schools private

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schools public

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METHODOLOGY

Our rankings this year were computed by statistician George Recck, director of the Math Resource Center at Babson College. As in years past, we gathered data on area schools by consulting school officials and websites, as well as the Massachusetts Department of Education. With this information, Recck calculated mean scores for each data category and then ranked schools based on their distance from the averages. With this traditional performance ranking in hand, he also evaluated performance against tuition, producing a ranking that shows which high schools deliver the most academic bang for the buck.

For schools that did not provide figures, the average was used as a placeholder when computing the rankings.

Our rankings focused on schools in Eastern Massachusetts, mostly inside or around the 495 belt. If your school is not on the list, it does not mean it did poorly, it just means it fell outside our coverage area.