Newsweek Ranks Los Alamitos High School Among Nation's Top Schools

Newsweek named Los Alamitos High School among the top 500 high schools in the nation this week.

The magazine enlisted a panel of experts to rate the country’s best high schools, finding Los Alamitos High School to be the 166th best school in the nation. Los Alamitos High School was among just a handful in the county to make the list.

The Newsweek panel is composed of Wendy Kopp of Teach for America;  Tom Vander Ark of Open Education Solutions and the former executive director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; and Linda Darling-Hammond, Stanford professor and founder of School Redesign Network. The panel rates the schools based on their rates of graduation, college matriculation, advance-placement courses offered and taken and SAT and ACT scores, as well as AP/IB/AICE scores.

According to Newsweek, Los Alamitos High School stands out for its student-teacher ratio of 32.2 students for every teacher and for its 100 percent graduation rate. The magazine also found that for every student, nearly two AP/IB tests were taken, and roughly 98 percent of the school’s seniors are college bound. Los Alamitos High School also stood out for having an average SAT score of 1653.