Washington Post High School Challenge Rankings

1. How does America’s Most Challenging High Schools work?

We take the total number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Advanced International Certificate of Education tests given at a school each year and divide by the number of seniors who graduated in May or June. I call this formula the Challenge Index. With a few exceptions, public schools that achieved a ratio of at least 1.00, meaning they had as many tests in 2013 as they had graduates, were put on the national list atwashingtonpost.com/highschoolchallenge. We rank the schools in order of ratio, with the highest (21.91) this year achieved by the American Indian Public Charter in Oakland, Calif., which repeats as the top-ranked school.

This year's Challenge

America's Most Challenging High Schools ranks schools through an index formula. View this year's national and local lists.

America’s Most Challenging High Schools 2014

Jay Mathews APR 4

Most schools in the top 100 of The Washington Post’s annual list do not have 11-person football teams.

The very best among high-caliber institutions

Jay Mathews APR 4

These top-performing schools were left off the Most Challenging High Schools list because of elite status.

Alternatives to the Challenge Index

Jay Mathews APR 4

There are other ways to rank the nation’s high schools; here are a few.

I think 1.00 is a modest standard. A school can reach that level if only half of its students take one AP, IB or AICE test in their junior year and one in their senior year. But this year, just 9 percent of the approximately 22,000 U.S. public high schools managed to reach that standard and earn placement on our list. On our list, the top 220 schools are in the top 1 percent nationally, the top 440 in the top 2 percent, and so on.