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La Canada Unified School District is proud of the many academic and extra-curricular achievements of its students. Click on the Achievements link to the left to read about some of the recent stories of excellence attained by our students. Then click on the titles of the articles to read the articles.
 
 
Feature Story
 

 

LCHS Rated Among High Schools in Nation

 

The US News & World Report "America's Best High Schools" list for 2010 was just released and ranks La Canada High School (LCHS) in the gold medal category for being within the top 100 high schools according to its measurement criteria.
 
Digging through the information a little deeper reveals even more impressive results:
 
LCHS is rated # 80 top high school in the United States
LCHS is rated # 15 top high school in California.
 
LCHS is rated # 23 top open enrollment high school in U.S.
LCHS is rated # 5 top open enrollment high school in California
LCHS is rated # 1 top open enrollment high school in Southern California.
 
Open enrollment schools (such as La Canada High School) are public schools who are not selective about who they will or will not accept as students. There are no application procedures other than proving residency within the public school boundaries. Many of the higher scoring schools have merit based enrollment (they only accept higher performing students) or are charter schools who can select the students who may attend, giving them a signficant edge over open enrollment schools.  When non-open enrollment schools are taken out of the listings, LCHS rises up to the top for Southern California.

U.S. News used a three-step process to determine the best high schools. The first two steps ensured that the schools serve all their students well, using state proficiency standards as the benchmarks. For those schools that made it past the first two steps, a third step assessed the degree to which schools prepare students for college-level work. This third step measured which schools produced the best college-level achievement for the highest percentages of their students. This was done by computing a "college readiness index" based on the school's AP or IB participation rate (the number of 12th-grade students who took at least one AP or IB test before or during their senior year, divided by the number of 12th graders) and how well the students did on those tests.

La Canada High School received a College Readiness Index of 67.9 based on information from the 2007-08 test scores that were considered. High schools in the top 100 list had College Readiness Indexes ranging from 63 to 100.

 More details can be found at the US News website here: