Best Schools Boston 2008

ABOUT OUR RANKINGS

Our goal in compiling this year’s list of the area’s 50 best public high schools was not to identify only those schools that are performing well, but also those doing so while operating efficiently, too. To gather our data, we consulted school officials, school websites, and the state Department of Education; if numbers were unavailable, we used data from previous surveys. If that failed, the mean for the category was used so as not to skew the analysis. Variables that would be expected to increase when enrollment rises were standardized in accordance with the size of the student body. We gave our data to professor I. Elaine Allen, research director of the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship at Babson College, who calculated the rankings using a weighted average of cost and performance data over several years. Using correlation analysis, factor analysis, standardization of scores, and Grey relational analysis, Allen created a common metric for comparison. Change over the previous three years was calculated to examine whether improved performance was related to change in spending. Because already-high-performing schools have little ability to increase their relative performance on standardized tests, two additional components were created: a factor for the relationship of a school’s improvement to any increased costs, and a current cost-efficiency factor, which measures academic performance against dollars spent. These two factors were weighted equally and combined to provide the final ranking. Only grades 9 through 12 were included. And while only districtwide per-pupil expenditure figures were available, we still consider those numbers relevant indicators of how efficiently high schools are being run: Even if per-pupil expenditure varies, the way a district chooses to allocate its money is still an indicator of overall effectiveness.