Northside College Prep named Illinois' No. 1 high school

After trailing Walter Payton College Prep for years, Northside College Prep has finally taken home the title of No. 1 public high school in Illinois.

In U.S. News & World Report's 2026-2027 Best High Schools rankings, released this August, Northside climbed 10 spots to No. 30 in the nation and took the No. 1 spot in Illinois, WTTW reported. Payton, which led the state last year at No. 32 nationally, fell 22 spots to No. 54 and slid to second in Illinois.

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) still dominates the list. Six of the state's Top 10 schools are CPS selective enrollment high schools. Four of them made the national Top 100: Northside, Payton, Lane Tech (No. 80) and Jones College Prep (No. 99), while Whitney Young Magnet High School just missed the cutoff at No. 107.

What’s more, the shakeup’s reached beyond Chicago's city limits. The Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora jumped from No. 120 to No. 88 nationally, moving from sixth to fourth in the state. Across the country, BASIS Tucson North in Arizona, last year's No. 1 school, fell to No. 58, NBC Chicago reported.

How the math works

U.S. News evaluated more than 27,000 public high schools and ranked nearly 18,000 of them using six weighted measures. College readiness, based on how many seniors take and earn qualifying scores on AP or IB exams, counts for 30% of a school's score. State test proficiency counts for 20%. Another 20% measures whether a school's test results beat expectations given its share of underserved students. The last 30% is split evenly among the performance of underserved students, the breadth of college-level coursework, and graduation rates.

 At the top of the list, schools are separated by narrow margins, so modest changes in one senior class's exam results can move a school several places. U.S. News does not publish a school-by-school explanation for why rankings shift.

The rankings also look backward. This year's list is built on data from the 2023-24 school year, so Payton's drop reflects a class that has already graduated.

What experts say

Researchers have long argued that rankings like these reward schools for the students they admit. In a 2017 critique for the American Enterprise Institute, education policy scholar Nat Malkus echoed that the rankings' heavy reliance on AP results makes it nearly impossible for non-selective schools to reach the top.

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That pattern holds in Illinois, where all six of the state's top schools choose students through a competitive admissions process.

Columbia University sociologist Aaron Pallas was blunter when U.S. News expanded into elementary and middle school ratings in 2021. "The U.S. News ratings provide very little useful information to anybody," he told Chalkbeat.

On the other hand, U.S. News defends the list as a tool for families. Announcing this year's rankings, LaMont Jones, the outlet's managing editor for education, said the data gives families the transparency they need to make the best choices for their children.

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CPS CEO Dr. Macquline King congratulated Northside on its No. 1 ranking in the district's Aug. 21 community letter. The district no longer ranks schools itself, though. CPS scrapped its numeric School Quality Rating Policy, and in December 2024 it replaced the policy with online school dashboards that report test scores, attendance, and graduation rates without assigning a rating.

What it means for families

For eighth graders applying to high school right now, a bigger change may be the admissions process itself. CPS replaced its high school admissions exam with the PreACT 9 Secure, a 2.5-hour test that students take Wednesday, Oct. 7. Under the district's new scoring rubric, selective enrollment applications are now scored out of 640 points instead of 900. The exam and seventh-grade grades still count equally. Applications close Friday, Nov. 13.

Payton remains the second-best public high school in Illinois and one of the Top 60 in the country. For Chicago families weighing selective enrollment options, the takeaway isn't that Payton has fallen off. Rather, it's that the gap between Illinois' top schools is small enough for one year of data to reshuffle the order.