Thursday, October 1, 2026
Just a few days after it was named one of the top high schools in the country by U.S. News & World Report, South Side High School received a similar honor from Newsweek, being ranked among the best high schools in America.
South Side High School was named 312 in the nation by Newsweek. It ranked the top 2,000 schools in the country, and Rockville Centre was in the top 25 percent. It received a 3.3 out of 5 from Newsweek.
While he was proud of the placement that SSHS received, district Superintendent Dr. William Johnson said he didn’t like the methodology behind the Newsweek assessment.
“The way it was put together, the formula favors schools that are very selective,” Johnson said. “So that the more selective the population, the more likely it is you’re going to find yourself on that list. If you go through the top 300 schools, you’d probably find that half to two-thirds of them are schools that have select populations, even though they purport to be public schools. Or, if you take a look at it, they’re communities that serve very select populations.”
The Newsweek rankings, unlike the U.S. News & World Report, Johnson said, give equal weight to both Advance Placement and International Baccalaureate programs, regardless of how many students are in each. So for a district like Rockville Centre that has many more IB kids than AP, it hurts the score.
About 80 percent of students at South Side wind up taking AP Calculus, Johnson said. Not all of them necessarily do well on the exam, but just the fact that they took calculus in high school means they’re more likely to graduate from college in four or five years.
“What many places do is that, unless you have a certain performance, the school district will not allow you to take the test,” said Johnson. “So they select-out the kids in advance. We don’t do that. We have everybody take it. And we want them to have that experience, because the experience in and of itself is a good preparation for the next level of schooling. So it’s going to drive down our numbers. And I don’t care.”
Though the ranking is an acknowledgement that the district and teachers at South Side are on the right track with students, there isn’t much of a benefit to the district.
“It’s a nice recognition, but it is not at all meaningful,” Johnson said. “What’s really meaningful to us is the number of kids who are involved in IB who walk out of South Side High School prepared to continue their education. That’s the most important thing I can do for a kid.”
