MILWAUKEE – Two Milwaukee Public Schools high schools are the only schools in the state to be ranked among the top 200 in the country by U.S. News and World Report in a report released Tuesday.
Rufus King International School ranked 130th nationally and Ronald Reagan College Preparatory High School ranked 197th. The next Wisconsin high school on the list was ranked 893rd.
MPS’ Milwaukee School of Languages ranked seventh among Wisconsin high schools, rounding out the three MPS high schools that were the only ones in southeast Wisconsin to be among the state’s top 20 (http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/wisconsin).
“This tells the world what we already know: We offer families high-quality schools where students are prepared for college and to be the leaders of their generation,” Superintendent Gregory Thornton said. “Our high school reform plans in the proposed 2012-13 budget include efforts to make sure we have even more schools on this list in the future.”
Both Rufus King and Ronald Reagan offer families the International Baccalaureate program, which was developed for the children of diplomats to ensure they have access to the highest quality education as they move around the world. IB programs help develop “the intellectual, personal, emotional and social skills to live, learn and work in a rapidly globalizing world,” according to the IB organization.
To create the list, U.S. News worked with the Washington, D.C.-based American Institutes for Research, “one of the largest behavioral and social science research organizations in the world,” according to the magazine. “AIR implemented U.S. News’s comprehensive rankings methodology, which is based on the key principles that a great high school must serve all of its students well, not just those who are college-bound, and that it must be able to produce measurable academic outcomes to show the school is successfully educating its student body across a range of performance indicators.”
