Well, it depends

Every year several lists tout the “best” high schools in California. Be wary when you look at these rankings. It’s good to ask a basic question: the best at what?

• The best at getting students into elite colleges?
• The best at educating kids who are poor?
• The best at educating kids with special needs?
• The best at educating kids whose parents went to college?
• The best at preparing kids in the arts?
• The best for kids with athletic aspirations?
• The best at educating students for a specific vocation?
• The best at spending money effectively?

Students from affluent, educated families begin school with a head start and fewer distractions. They learn to read earlier. They learn numbers earlier. They attend preschool and learn the norms of school earlier.

There are thousands of high schools in California. If a high school enrolls many students with these advantages, it will tend to score well on tests even if its teachers are unremarkable or the learning environment is uninspiring. It's not so much that the school is great, necessarily, if all it needs to do is serve as an effective filter. Can or should a school or district be considered the “best” if it starts with these advantages and merely maintains its lead?

Another way to consider greatness in a school is to consider context. When schools score well in exclusive neighborhoods with lots of advantages, well, that's expected. By contrast, when schools score well in ordinary neighborhoods, that's Hollywood.

The California Department of Education doesn’t rank schools, but it recognizes hundreds of them as distinguished schools based on state tests.

GreatSchools is useful for comparing schools

GreatSchools, a national nonprofit organization, rates schools on several ten-point scales, but stops short of ranking them. If you are looking to make a decision that involves a choice of schools, this is an excellent place to start.

Several organizations DO rank California high schools including US News & World Report, Niche, Money, Inc., Public School Review, and the SF Chronicle (behind a paywall).

Clearly, the authors of these lists have different filters. What do the lists have in common?

• Selective: On all of the lists, the top schools have selective admission.
• Academic theme: Many of them have a curricular emphasis such as math and science, or the arts.
• Asian students: In many of these schools, the student body is primarily Asian.
• Wealth: Some of the top schools serve relatively affluent communities. All of the schools served fewer students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged than the state average of 63.6%.
• Attendance: Many of the top schools have excellent attendance rates.

School funding and rankings

Schools in wealthy areas feature strongly in these lists. Some of these school communities are so rich that their basic school funding from local property taxes is higher than the state’s guaranteed funding level.

For example, Money, Inc. features two schools on its top-five list from Palo Alto Unified School District: Palo Alto High School and Gunn High. This district in the high-income Silicon Valley area receives only basic funding from the state under the Local Control Funding Formula, but it has excellent funding through local property taxes, and it raises even more. Overall, it spends about twice as much per student as the average school district gets from the state.

School attendance and rankings

In virtually all of the schools on these lists, students show up to school at rates much higher than typical schools. The chronic absence rate in the state is 19.4%. Half of these top schools have chronic absence rates below 10%. The research is clear: students who show up for school do better academically.

Does your school defy the odds?

As the lists above suggest, privilege and excellence are related in schools. In 2026, a set of research reports, Getting Down to Facts III, compared the typical academic achievement of wealthier students with lower-income students. The findings provide insight into why it’s important to recognize the success of schools with larger numbers of low income students. Their academic success defies the odds and reflects the hard work of these school communities. According to the report:

Wealthy communities: Higher test scores. “ Students in districts at the 90th percentile of socioeconomic status score, on average, 2.7 grade levels higher in math and 2.5 grade levels higher in reading than those in districts at the 10th percentile. These large disparities result from the vastly different sets of educational opportunities available to children growing up in families and communities with different levels of economics.

Opportunity gap evident in early grades. “The study shows that the disparity between high- and low-SES districts is already large by third grade. This suggests that some of the forces that shape patterns and trends in educational opportunity operate relatively early in children’s lives and schooling careers.”

Academic Growth Disparity. “The test scores of economically advantaged, Asian, and White students in California have grown, on average, faster than those of economically disadvantaged, Hispanic, and Black students. In addition, the test scores of female students have declined more since 2019 than boys’ scores.”

A school is not “bad” because its students start out from behind. The corollary: a school is not the “best” just because its students start out ahead.

What is success in a school?

Rankings of top schools have a certain appeal. They name winners. They crown a school as best. They also imply, intentionally or not, that if a school is not ranked well on their list, the school is not so good.

But we can see just from looking at samples from these three “best” lists that there really is not a number one school. These lists disagree even about the top five. And they leave out schools with other measures of success. If there is one takeaway, it is that there are many, many ways to look at success.

So what should you do the next time someone talks about how well a school is ranked? First, congratulate the students, teachers and parents. It takes a lot of effort to achieve academic excellence, and endless ways to blow it. But then take it a step further. Use it as an opportunity to discuss the many ways of measuring success, what these lists reveal and what they miss.