Dive Brief:

• U.S. News and World Report on Tuesday unveiled its 2015 Best High School rankings.
• The rankings include 21,150 public high schools and are topped for the fourth consecutive year by the School for the Talented and Gifted in Dallas, TX.
• The states with the most high-performing high schools were Maryland (30% of eligible schools), California (27%), and Connecticut (25%).

Dive Insight:

The U.S. News Best High School rankings include not only traditional public high schools, but magnets and charters, as well. This year's release also included individual rankings for the Best Charter Schools, Best Magnet Schools, and Best STEM Schools.

Within the rankings, the publication awards schools gold, silver, and bronze medals indicating students' overall levels of college readiness, and this year's rankings saw 6,517 schools — about a third of those eligible — receive a medal. The publication's methodology for the rankings includes determining whether a school's students are performing higher than average on their state's exam, analyzing low-income and minority students' performance compared to the state's average, and, finally, considering performance on Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate test data, which also informs the "College Readiness Index" used to award the aforementioned medals.

They're worth a look — especially for comparison to rankings systems that measure the states at large, like the state report card included in Education Week's Quality Counts report.