MACHS high in U.S. News rankings
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U.S. News and World Report is out with its annual ranking of American high schools, and the news magazine lists Mount Ayr Community High School among the state’s best.
Coming in at #53 out of over 402 public high schools in the state, U.S. News cites Mount Ayr’s test scores, especially in reading and math, which fall above state averages.
Mount Ayr also ranked #5,994 among nearly 24,000 high schools nationwide.
(Some schools like Diagonal High School, for example, have too few students to arrive at ranking.)
According to U.S. News, “Schools are ranked on their performance on state-required tests, graduation and how well they prepare students for college.”
Statistics compiled by U.S. News shows Mount Ayr high school students are 82 percent proficient in math and 86 percent proficient in reading, both above state averages. In fact, Mount Ayr’s math and reading performance ranks #5 in the state, according to U.S. News statistics.
Mount Ayr’s graduation rate of 91 percent ranks #249 among Iowa high schools.
Other area high schools were included in the latest rankings from U.S. News:
Bedford 39
Lamoni 51
Mount Ayr 53
Murray 80
Creston 142
Nodaway Val. 145
Lenox 161
Wayne 191
Clarke 210
Cent. Decatur 217
Schools ranking 218 or above were not given an individual ranking score.
U.S. News explained their ranking procedures:
“In coordination with North Carolina-based RTI International, a global nonprofit social science research firm, U.S. News ranked approximately 17,860 public high schools out of the nearly 24,000 reviewed. This is the count of public high schools that had a 12th grade enrollment of 15 or greater, or otherwise had sufficient enrollment in other high school grades during the 2018-2019 school year to be analyzed.
“We did this by summing their weighted scores across six indicators of school quality, then computed a single zero to 100 overall score reflective of a school’s performance across these metrics. The overall scores depict how well each school did on a national percentile basis. For example, a school with a score of 60 performed in the 60th percentile among all schools in the rankings.
“Ranks were assigned in descending order of overall scores. Schools below the 25th percentile have their scores concealed and display the entire bottom quartile’s ranking range. Schools without a grade 12 or with very small enrollment are simply displayed as unranked.”
