School makes Newsweek magazine’s top 1500 list.

Newsweek magazine has named Hart High School one of America’s top 1500 high schools, based on the school’s Advanced Placement program. Hart was ranked 948 out of approximately 40,000 high schools nationwide.

Hart High had just under 2200 students enrolled last year and administered 1009 AP exams with a 75 percent pass rate, a record for the Hart District. All of the schools on the magazine’s list are in the top six percent of public schools, according to the formulas used to create the list. Hart has made the list several times in the past.

Public schools on the list are ranked according to a ratio of the number of Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB), and Cambridge tests taken by all students at the school in 2008, divided by the number of graduating seniors. All of the schools on the list have an index of at least 1.000; Hart’s index is 1.600.

“AP, IB, and Cambridge are important because they give average students a chance to experience the trauma of heavy college reading lists and long, analytical college examinations,” explains author Jay Mathews in the “Newsweek” online post. “…even low-performing, low-income students who got only a 2 (out of a possible score of 5) on an AP test did significantly better in college than similar students who did not take AP in high school.”

The magazine also lists the percentage of students receiving subsidized lunches, an indication of low income. Slightly less than 18 percent of students at Hart qualify for subsidized meals.

Hart posts an “equity and excellence” (E&E) score of 34.4 percent, which represents the proportion of all graduating seniors that had at least one passing grade on an AP or IB test. The average E&E percentage rate across the nation in 2008 was 15.2 percent.