Freehold High School Ranks Among the Best

www.app.com/article/20081211/NEWS01/812110475/1004/NEWS01

Magazine: High Tech High 4th in nation


MIDDLETOWN — High Technology High School has been named the fourth-best public high school in the country by U.S. News and World Report, raising the school's rank three positions from its 2007 spot as the seventh-best high school in the country.

In a list posted Dec. 4, the 262-student vocational school was selected based on the specific performance of minority students, as well as the performance of all participating students in 2006-07 Advanced Placement testing.

Other Monmouth and Ocean County schools named in the silver and bronze categories — among the top 504 in the nation — were the Academy of Allied Health and Science in Neptune, Freehold Borough High School, and the Marine Academy of Science and Technology in Sandy Hook in the silver category and Communications High School in Wall and the Marine Academy of Technology and Environmental Science in Stafford in the bronze category.

Freehold High School was the only traditional public school in Monmouth and Ocean counties to receive the recognition.

The ranking is compiled based on students in grades nine through 12 who have taken at least one AP or International Baccalaureate exam during their time at the school.

U.S. News and World Report holds that the marker of a good school is its ability to educate all of its students, not just a small group of them, and that the best schools outperform expectations based on socioeconomic status or percentage of black and Hispanic students, according to the magazine's Web site.

Test scores in schools with minority or low-income students are weighted more heavily in the U.S. News formula, developed by School Evaluation Services, a kindergarten-through-12th-grade education data research business run by Standard & Poor's.

High Tech High, which assesses students through AP testing, ranked as having a 98.4 college-readiness level, meaning that those students are well-versed in some college-level material.

High Tech High Principal Dan Simon said much of the credit for the achievement belongs to kindergarten-through-eighth grade schools throughout Monmouth County that educate students before they attend the career vocational school.

"These students come to us as high achievers. . . . And they continue to perform as long as you give them the support they need," he said.

Simon said the high performance of vocational students is not a surprise.

"The purpose of what our academies do is to take the students who are talented and interested in the particular career themes, harness that and take it to the next level," he said.

Simon said that as a result of this method, the college attendance rate for the school is about 100 percent, with approximately 98 percent of seniors attending four-year universities straight out of high school.

The No. 1-ranked school in the country, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., came in with an assessment of 100 percent of its students being college-ready.

About 21,000 high schools in 48 states were examined to compile the ranking.