Rison High School Makes U.S. News 'Best Schools'

RISON - U.S. News & World Report has named Rison High School to its national "Best High Schools" rankings for exceeding academic expectations based on social and economic factors. U.S. News & World Report's 2023-2024 "Best High Schools" rankings is for those public high schools "whose students demonstrated outstanding outcomes above expectations in math, reading and science state assessments, earned qualifying scores in an array of collegelevel exams, and graduated in high proportions," according to the U.S. News website announcing the rankings. Rison High School was the top-rated high school within the Pine Bluff metropolitan area; ranked 75th among 277 high schools in Arkansas included on the list; and ranked 5,240th nationally among the 17,680 schools that made the list. U.S. News reported that 25,000 schools were considered for the rankings. North Carolina-based RTI International, a global nonprofit social science research firm, conducted the school survey for U.S. News. "We did this by summing their weighted scores across six indicators of school quality, then computed a single zero to 100 overall score reflective of a school's performance across these metrics," wrote Robert Morse and Eric Brooks for U.S. News. "The overall scores depict how well each school did on a national percentile basis. For example, a school with a score of 60 performed in the 60th percentile among all schools in the rankings." Davy King, who was the high school principal last school year that was included in the survey, credited the teachers and the students for the achievement. "A lot of the credit goes to the teachers," King said. "Having those teachers willing to go above and beyond to make sure these kids learn and understand." He also praised the teachers' expectations for achievement, and the students' willingness to put in the work to achieve those kind of test scores. "That's very, very important (continued from page 1) that we don't miss out on any kids not…