America's Best High Schools: The List

Each year, NEWSWEEK picks the best high schools in the country based on how hard school staffs work to challenge students with advanced-placement college-level courses and tests. Just over 1.600 schools—only 6 percent of all the public schools in the U.S.—made the list.  This year's rankings have some fantastic new interactive features. We’ve teamed up with a data company called Factual to create individual profile pages for each school where students and faculty can comment and contribute. Check out the profiles by clicking on the name of any school in the list. And don't miss this photo gallery of the top 20 schools, the list of the public schools that are too elite for our rankings, a quiz about celebrity nerds, and a gallery of the 13 best movies about high school.  (For more information about how our rankings are calculated, see our FAQ.)

**asterisks denote schools that offer International Baccalaureate or Cambridge exams.