People seem to take these studies as entirely quantitative, but the basis for scoring is a test that almost certainly saturates before the upper levels of high

People seem to take these studies as entirely quantitative, but the basis for scoring is a test that almost certainly saturates before the upper levels of high school. I went to a magnet STEM school for half of every day in my last two years of high school. In my rural county, there was no way I was going to get good calculus and physics classes, let alone any programming, modern physics, or advanced math, without the pooling of resources among the several farm town high schools. It undoubtedly increased what my high school education could provide me. It also would not show up on any testing that would be measured in these studies. I could have watched Netflix instead of taking classes for all of my last two years of high school, and I still would have showed up the same from the perspective of this study: passed every standardized test. But people fall for these metrics time after time, and school rankings are based on them. My public high school was ranked in the bottom 10% because our pass rates are abysmal, which obviously stems from our huge number of impoverished broken families. The 85-90% AP test pass rate told a different story: show up every day ready to work, and they had some good teachers who would really work with you.