15 Best Public High Schools in New York City

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Crack open your books and study guides because we’re about to take a look at the best public high schools in New York City.

The public school system is constantly under fire for underperforming and overall providing students with an inadequate education. While in certain instances this might be true, particularly due to a lack of funding, there are many public schools that thrive and prepare students for the next steps in their lives. While I didn’t actually enjoy school, my public school experience was actually pretty nice. I went to a small school where a lot of the teachers taught multiple areas within their subject of expertise, but because of the fact that there weren’t many students, there was a lot of individualized attention. If I needed help with a homework assignment, it was pretty easy to find my teachers and talk to them about it.

15 Best Public Schools in New York City

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I think a lot of problems with public schools is a lack of funding that leads to fewer teachers handling more students. This causes some students to get lost in the shuffle and fall behind rather quickly. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t have the money to send their kids to private school, so public school is the only legitimate option. Many can thrive in these environments, but it takes a lot of work and initiative. I can imagine it takes extra work to thrive in the largest public high schools in New York City as well.

New York City is a big place with a lot of schools, so it’s important that we were able to utilize different resources to narrow down our options. In order to create this list, we looked at U.S. News to see what was determined the best public schools. U.S. News worked with RTI International to come up with the best ranking system. There were a variety of factors considered. Foremost, whether or not students from each school perform better than other students in the same state. Next, whether minority and economically disadvantaged students outperform expectations for the state. Lastly, schools were judged on college readiness, which is determined based on the AP or IB participation rate. We simply utilized the same system and narrowed our search to just New York City in order to give you the list you’re about to read.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the best public high schools in New York City.

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