U.S. News & World Report has released their Best High School Rankings for the 2026-27 school year and several area schools did well. Out of 339 public schools in Arkansas, four area schools, Valley Springs, Cotter, Melbourne and Harrison, ranked in the top 50. Missouri has 726 public schools and two in the area, Gainesville and Branson, both made the top 100 in the state.
According to their website, U.S. News and World Report says the schools that did the best in their rankings arethose whose students demonstrated outstanding outcomes above expectations in math, reading and science state assessments, earned qualifying scores on an array of college-level exams, and graduated in high proportions.
U.S. News did this by summing their weighted scores across six indicators of school quality, then computing a single zero to 100 overall score reflective of a school’s performance across these metrics. The overall scores depict how well each school did on a national percentile basis. For example, a school with a score of 60 performed in the 60th percentile among all schools in the rankings…