America's Top Public High Schools (Atlanta Metro School Rankings) (Sandy Springs: credit, college)

[globalnomad]

The 2007 list of America's Top Public High Schools has beeen released by Newsweek Magazine. The complete listing can be found at:

The 1,200 Top U.S. Schools - Newsweek America's Best High Schools - MSNBC.com (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12532678/site/newsweek/ - broken link)

Or you can Google "America's Top Public High Schools"

Public schools are ranked according to a ratio: the number of Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB) and/or Cambridge tests taken by all students at a school in 2006 divided by the number of graduating seniors. All of the schools on the list have an index of at least 1.000; they are in the top 5 percent of US public schools measured this way.

In 2007, no Georgia public high schools made it on the top 100 list.

Important Note: tried to list just the ones in the Atlanta metro area rather than all of Georgia, but may have missed a few schools on the list because I'm unfamiliar with all the school names.

You'll have to read the entire Newsweek article online to get the background/history/philosophy for the school rankings.

The Challenge Index is designed to honor schools that have done the best job in persuading average students to take college-level courses and tests.

[jxu66]

More schools from atlanta metro areas.

535 North gwinnett
561 Duluth high
645 Central Gwinnett
841 Peachtree Ridge

By the way, IMO, the list is meaningless.

[chiefs fan]

Here's one in West Cobb:

929 Harrison (Kennesaw)

[GF72]

lol half of those locations are wrong...

Walton, Pope, Wheeler, Sprayberry are in East Cobb... Milton is in Milton.... Northview and Chattahoochee are in Johns Creek.... North Springs and Riverwood are in Sandy Springs... Yet somehow they got the location for Dunwoody right, even though that's still unincorporated...

[xxman777]

Originally Posted by GF72

lol half of those locations are wrong...

Walton, Pope, Wheeler, Sprayberry are in East Cobb... Milton is in Milton.... Northview and Chattahoochee are in Johns Creek.... North Springs and Riverwood are in Sandy Springs... Yet somehow they got the location for Dunwoody right, even though that's still unincorporated...

Its because those are the mailing addresses of the different schools. A lot of times a property will have the address of a city they are not in; it's based on which Post Office their mail comes from. Somehow Dunwoody got a post office and properties within the area (including Dunwoody HS) have Dunwoody mailing addresses. Why the Post Office decided to allow people to mail stuff to Dunwoody, I don't know.

[GF72]

yeah I know why, I was just amused at how half of everyone in metro atlanta has a wrong address...

Actually i believe North Springs and Riverwood and the rest of Sandy Springs finally got Sandy Springs addresses now, instead of Atlanta. I think Johns Creek is going to get their own addresses around June, instead of the Alpharetta and Duluth addresses they have now.

About the Dunwoody thing... it's not like Sandy Springs and Johns Creek don't have post offices within the area, but those post offices got stamped with the addresses of whatever city they labeled that particular zip code to be. For example I live in East Cobb, and we have several post offices in East Cobb (the Mount Bethel post office near lower roswell/johnson ferry, the East Cobb post office on east cobb drive near roswell/johnson ferry, the Sandy Plains post office near sprayberry, maybe more) that serve only East Cobb, but they all have Marietta addresses, even though none of our mail comes from the Marietta post office and Marietta city limits is like 10 miles from the mount bethel and east cobb post offices (roswell and sandy springs city limits on the other hand are within 2 miles...)... But I've always wondered why Dunwoody works for the post office, even though according to them it's supposed to be Atlanta there... weird.

[sumiller2000]

I've never been too impressed by these rankings. All that they tell me is that either the school is chock full of privileged kids or that they are packing kids who are not qualified to take AP into AP classes so that no one is really learning anything.

What is much more important to me is what percentage of kids in AP classes at a given school make a 3 or better on the AP. Knowing who scores well enough to get college credit tells me if the AP teachers are actually teaching something.

Here is the rank of the list at the beginning of this string showing the percentage of those scoring 3 or better rather than just the number of kids that they cram into AP classes....... It is based on 2006 numbers b/c I don't have the 2007 yet....


northview 87.4
north springs 86.7
roswell 85.5
chattahoochie 85.4
parkview 84.4
alpharetta 82.1
pope 79.4
chamblee 78.8
wheeler 78.7
milton 77.8
centennial 76.9
dekalb arts 75.9
starr's mill 75.7
mcintosh 74
riverwood 69.5
walton 68.9
decatur 68.3
sequoyah 64.9
norcross 64.4
south forsyth 60.2
dunwoody 59
sprayberry 57.5
lakeside 50.9
druid hills 47.2
tucker 38.9

Sorry about the formatting. I pasted it. Anyway, you can see that the list looks quite different when you look at how many actually "pass" the AP. Fir instance Lakeside is the third highest among metro atlanta schools if you look # taking AP classes but is 22nd out of 25 if you look at how many of those kids actually "pass." Similarly, Walton goes from #1 to #15.

[xavier132487]

Walton, Pope, Wheeler, Sprayberry are in East Cobb...

East Cobb is not a city or a municipality, just a portion of a county. Their zips are in the city of Marietta. So, the Marietta listing is correct no matter what.

[xavier132487]

About the Dunwoody thing... it's not like Sandy Springs and Johns Creek don't have post offices within the area, but those post offices got stamped with the addresses of whatever city they labeled that particular zip code to be. For example I live in East Cobb, and we have several post offices in East Cobb (the Mount Bethel post office near lower roswell/johnson ferry, the East Cobb post office on east cobb drive near roswell/johnson ferry, the Sandy Plains post office near sprayberry, maybe more) that serve only East Cobb, but they all have Marietta addresses, even though none of our mail comes from the Marietta post office and Marietta city limits is like 10 miles from the mount bethel and east cobb post offices (roswell and sandy springs city limits on the other hand are within 2 miles...)... But I've always wondered why Dunwoody works for the post office, even though according to them it's supposed to be Atlanta there... weird.

Actually, the zips do touch into Marietta.

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/ThematicMapFramesetServlet?_bm=y&-_MapEvent=displayBy&-errMsg=&-_useSS=N&-_dBy=860&-redoLog=false&-_zoomLevel=&-tm_name=DEC_2000_SF1_U_M00090&-tm_config=|b=50|l=en|t=4001|zf=0.0|ms=thm_def|dw=1 .0922730753507848|dh=0.6823378649414827|dt=gov.cen sus.aff.domain.map.EnglishMapExtent|if=gif|cx=-84.557181|cy=33.912473000000006|zl=6|pz=6|bo=|bl=| ft=350:349:335:389:388:332:331|fl=403:381:204:380: 369:379:368|g=05000US13067|ds=DEC_2000_SF1_U|sb=50 |tud=false|db=060|mn=1153|mx=3172|cc=1|cm=1|cn=5|c b=|um=Persons/Sq%20Mile|pr=0|th=DEC_2000_SF1_U_M00090|sf=N|sg=&-PANEL_ID=tm_result&-_pageY=&-_lang=en&-geo_id=05000US13067&-_pageX=&-_mapY=&-_mapX=&-_latitude=&-_pan=&-ds_name=DEC_2000_SF1_U&-_longitude=&-_changeMap=Identify#?328,157

[GF72]

Originally Posted by runningncircles1

East Cobb is not a city or a municipality, just a portion of a county. Their zips are in the city of Marietta. So, the Marietta listing is correct no matter what.

Dunwoody is also not a city or municipality, just a portion of a county. Same was true for Johns Creek, Milton, and Sandy Springs as little as 3 years ago. For several decades half of the northern suburbs were nothing more than just unincorporated portions of counties, given addresses of whatever city the post office felt like giving them, except for Dunwoody, which for whatever reason got their own addresses even though it's just as unincorporated as Sandy Springs was or East Cobb is now. Only a tiny part of each of the East Cobb zip codes (30068, 30067, 30066, 30062) are within Marietta city limits, 80% to 95% of these zip codes are within the area called East Cobb. East Cobb has several of its own post offices (more than Marietta even) that serve East Cobb only and some serve no area even close to Marietta city limits. If you actually take a drive through East Cobb you'll see the area has its own identity (about the same as Dunwoody and Sandy Springs, and far more so than the "cities" of Milton and Johns Creek, which are nothing more than a thrown-together collection of random communities). Anyway, this is getting way off topic....