It’s no secret that schools in poor neighborhoods often struggle. But some achieve a remarkable amount in relation to the poverty of their communities. Newsweek calls these Transformative Schools, and for the second year in a row, we have created a list of the top 25.
To compile the Transformative list, we took the scores from Newsweek’s top 1,000 schools and factored in the percentage of students who qualified for free- or reduced-price lunches—the most reliable measure of socio-economic status in American high schools. Schools that restrict admissions based on academics were ineligible; the purpose of the list is to highlight schools where enthusiasm is the only defining metric.