In this file photo, Mayer High School Spanish students read to developmentally disabled students.

Courtesy photo

Mayer Junior/Senior High School is one of the top 24 high schools in Arizona, according to U.S. News & World Report.

"We were one of three rural schools in Arizona and only one in Yavapai County to be honored in the magazine's Best High Schools 2008 Search," Pat Dallabetta, Mayer Unified School District superintendent said.

He said, "This ranking says a lot for what we do."

Dallabetta said the ranking involves a three-step process. In the first level the magazine looked at Mayer's reading and math test results to see if its students were performing better than expected for the average student in the state.

The magazine then factored in the percentage of economically disadvantaged students, including English Language Learner students, homeless and special education students to see which schools did better than the state's expectations. Mayer has a high number of these students, Dallabetta said. Ninety students qualify as homeless.

The second step, he said, looked at how blacks, Hispanics and low-income students did compared to similar students in the state.

The schools, like Mayer, that performed better than the state average qualified for the Bronze listing.

Dallabetta said Mayer couldn't advance to the third step, which judges college-readiness performance using Advanced Placement data as the school just started its Advanced Placement program this year.

The high school was a Performing Plus School this past year, so this ranking just helps to verify the job the teachers are doing, he said.

Andrew J. Rotherham, codirector of Education Sector and a member of the Virginia Board of Education, helped with America's Best High Schools methodology. Standard & Poor's School Evaluation Services, a K-12 education data research business, developed the methodology.

He said prior to U.S News' rankings the most prominent ranking of American high schools was Newsweek's list of "best" high schools.

Newsweek, Rotherdam said, ranks high schools using a method based exclusively on Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate tests.

"Sara Mead and I have shown that Newsweek's measure of quality means that schools can be highly ranked even if they fail to provide a high-quality education to most of their students," Rotherdam said in the Dec. 12, 2007 issue of U.S. News.

Robert J . Morse of U.S. News, said the magazine analyzed 18,790 public high schools in 40 states using data from the 2005-2006 school year.

Alabama, Alaska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming and Washington, D.C. were excluded because they didn't make their 2005-2006 school year state test data available, Morse said.

He said the magazine excluded Mississippi, Montana and Nebraska because they provided insufficient 2005-2006 assessment data to complete the analysis.