For the tenth consecutive year, Hamilton High School was named to the U.S. News & World Report “America’s Best High Schools” list. Hamilton is ranked 15th among 462 Wisconsin public high schools and 739th among 17,655 U.S. public high schools that made the ranking.
The ranking highlights the best public high schools in the nation after review of data to identify how well schools serve all students in preparing them in basic skills and readiness for college-level work.
“Hamilton High School has continued to secure a top 20 rating over the years and now to crack that top 15 is absolutely worth celebrating,” says Hamilton High School Principal Rebecca Newcomer. “It is a testament to the hard work of our faculty, our school leadership team and our Curriculum and Assessment team. We have made some changes over the past five years and they are paying off. Our focus on instructional best practices are supporting learning in different ways and our classrooms look different than they did previously. I am extremely proud of the hard work that has been done to create alignment and curricular fidelity,” she adds.
Schools were ranked based on:
- college readiness – the proportion of 12th grade students who took and earned a qualifying score on at least one Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) exam (30% of ranking);
- state assessment proficiency – the aggregated scores on state assessments that students may be required to pass for graduation (20%);
- state assessment performance – whether performance on state assessments exceeded expectations given the school’s proportion of underserved students (20%);
- underserved student performance – how Black, Hispanic and low-income students performed on state assessments compared with those who are not underserved in the state (10%);
- college curriculum breadth – the proportions of 12th grade students who took and earned a qualifying score on AP or IB exams in multiple content areas (10%); and
- graduation rate – the proportion of students who entered ninth grade in 2017-18 and graduated four years later (10%).
“The 2024 Best High Schools rankings offer a starting point for parents to understand a school’s academic performance, whether it’s a prospective school or one that their child is already attending,” says LaMont Jones, Ed.D., managing editor of education at U.S. News. “Accessible data on our high schools can empower families across the country as they navigate today’s educational environment and plan for the future.”