West Wilkes, Elkin Schools Among Nation's Best

Some students in Wilkes county are attending one of the top schools in the nation. In the issue of US News and World Report that hit the shelves yesterday, West Wilkes High School was one of three named a bronze medalist in the first-ever Best High Schools Report. Elkin Schools received a silver medal, and West Caldwell, Allegheny and Ashe county schools also made the bronze medalist rankings. No North Carolina schools received gold medals.

According to the US News web site, the schools were scored in the following manner: "Using a formula produced in collaboration with School Evaluation Services, a K-12 data research and analysis business run by Standard & Poor's, we put high schools in 40 states through a three-step analysis. First, we measured how each school's students performed on state tests, adjusting for student circumstances. We next evaluated how well each school's disadvantaged students did. Finally, we looked at whether the school was successful in providing college-level coursework." The top 100 schools were given gold medals, the next 405 received silver, and 1-thousand, 86 received bronze.

See the full report.