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50 Best High Schools

The hard thing about choosing the best school for your family is that you’re always comparing apples and oranges. Will your child love this school’s award-winning band program enough to forget about the cool jazz ensemble at that other school? Which one is more important: two dozen AP offerings or classrooms with only a dozen students? And is it better to start in single A or ride the bench in AAAAA? The choices are never easy. But one thing is certain. You want to know whether your children’s school will get them ready for college.

Average SAT scores are helpful, but they alone can be misleading. Sometimes high SATs just mean a school has little socioeconomic diversity. So for this year’s guide, we’ve combined nine different indicators of college readiness. Taken together, they present a compelling portrait of how well public schools prepare their graduates. And for the first time ever, we’ve ranked their performance.

Feature

Food Fight
If you haven’t eaten in a school cafeteria in a while, you might find yourself both relieved and horrified by its evolution. The ubiquitous Jell-O and canned green beans of yore are gone, but pizza and chicken nuggets still rule. Children as young as kindergartners are allowed to choose burgers and flavored milk (twenty-two grams of sugar per cup, as opposed to twelve grams for plain milk) day after day. Fresh produce—even a simple salad bar—is a rarity. And this in Georgia, which produces more market vegetables than all but three other states in America.

Why, given Georgia’s agricultural abundance, is it so hard to get more of those vegetables into our schools?
>> Read the story by Deborah Geering

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Private School Guide