Barrington High School dropped nearly 5,000 places in the recent U.S. News and World Report “Best High Schools” ranking.

BHS ranked 308 out of nearly 20,000 high schools in last year’s rankings, but slipped to 5,140 in the 2023 list. Barrington Superintendent of Schools Michael Messore said district officials were investigating what caused the drastic drop, but he had a theory. 

Messore said U.S. News and World Report failed to include Barrington’s “College Readiness” and “College Curriculum Breadth” scores when calculating this year’s rank. 

Those categories carried “NAs” in this year’s ranking.

According to the U.S. News and World Report’s explanation of how the rankings were compiled, “Five states — Oregon, Rhode Island, Wyoming, Maine and Oklahoma — were the only states that did not give U.S. News permission to use their schools’ AP data in the rankings. As a result, the AP test data was not used in the rankings for the schools in these five states.”

Messore said those two categories account for 40 percent of the ranking, and Barrington has historically performed very well in those two categories, resulting in impressive national rankings each year. 

“We have a significant number of students (take AP tests) every year,” Messore said. (Other Rhode Island high schools also dropped precipitously in this year’s ranking.)

“The College Readiness Index is measured by the proportion of a school’s 12th graders who took and earned a qualifying score on Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exams,” stated the U.S. News website. The College Curriculum Breadth is a similar index, calculated among a schools’ 12th graders from the percentage who took AP exams and the percentage who earned qualifying scores.

Messore said he asked Barrington Schools Communications Director Kate Benoit to look into the situation. He emailed U.S. News and World Report about the missing data, and also emailed a very high-ranking official with the Rhode Island Department of Education. 

It is not clear why RIDE would not release the AP data to U.S. News and World Report. It is the first time in the last eight years that the state refused to release that information.