Pine-Richland is earning top honors statewide and is being ranked in the top 10 in the state by two national publications and in the region by a local publication.
National Publications
> The Washington Post uses an index formula that takes account of number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Advanced International Certificate of Education tests given at a school each year, divided by the number of seniors who graduated that year to rank the most challenging high school’s in the US.
Mr. Jay Mathews, an education columnist for the Washington Post, who has been ranking America’s most challenging schools for 18 years, says the Challenge Index is designed to identify schools that have done the best job in persuading average students to take college-level courses and tests.
"The list reveals many schools that have decided thinking and writing are as important as reading,” said Washington Post Education Columnist Jay Mathews, who has been ranking America’s most challenging schools for 18 years. “With good teaching, they have found ways to convince even the most laid-back, average students of the necessity and importance of those subjects, too."
Click here to see more about the Washington Post’s methodology and the publication’s ranking of the 2,300 most challenging high schools in the US.
US News & World Report – PRHS 10th in PA
> US News & World Report ranked Pine-Richland High School 10th in the state. Editors used a four-step process to determine the best high schools in the US. The first three steps ensure schools serve all of their students using their performance on the math and reading parts of state proficiency tests and graduation rates as benchmarks. For schools making it past the first steps, a final step assesses the degree to which schools prepare students for college-level work using Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate test data as the benchmark for success.
In
all, US News & World ranked about 20,000 schools. Some were eliminated if
they were too small to be analyzed. Click
here for more on the methodology and rankings.
Local Publication
The Pittsburgh Business Times – Pine-Richland School District 9th in the region
The Pittsburgh Business Times ranked Pine-Richland School District ninth in the region out of nearly 105 schools. In all nearly 500 schools were ranked in PA. This annual ranking report bases its guide on scores from the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment exams and the Keystone exams. The 2016 Guide to Western Pennsylvania Schools also ranks schools by grade levels.
