Alabama has some exceptional public schools. We should make sure the rest of the country knows about them. That sounds simple, but the latest U.S. News & World Report high school rankings show why it is not.
Alabama Daily News recently reported that eight Alabama public high schools ranked among the top 5 percent nationally. That is excellent news for our state and deserves celebration.
But the story also included a surprising omission. Montgomery’s LAMP High School, previously Alabama’s highest-ranked public high school, was not ranked. U.S. News said it did not receive the ACT data it needed from the state.
My school, the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science (ASMS), is also missing from the U.S. News rankings. ASMS is a public high school created by the Alabama Legislature to serve students from across our state. Alabama families pay no tuition, and students live and learn together on our campus in Mobile. For more than three decades, young people from all 67 counties have come to ASMS for advanced opportunities in mathematics, science, engineering, computer science, research, and the humanities.
Yet ASMS is not fully represented in some of the state data used by national organizations to compare public schools.
I think Alabama should fix that. Not because rankings are the ultimate measure of a school. They are not. Schools are far too complicated, and students are far too important, to reduce their success to a single rankings number. But data still matter. Families use them. Policymakers use them. Businesses considering where to invest look at education data. People forming an impression of Alabama look at them. When one of our successful public schools is missing from a major national comparison because the necessary data are unavailable, the picture of public education in Alabama is incomplete.
ASMS is a good example of why that matters.
ASMS students hail from all 67 Alabama counties, and every one of our graduates is college-bound. In 2026, six grads were National Merit Finalists. That outstanding class earned approximately $23 million in merit scholarships and posted an average ACT score of 30. Two-thirds chose to attend college right here in Alabama.
And the investment continues to pay dividends long after graduation. Approximately 74 percent of ASMS alumni live and work in Alabama. They are physicians, engineers, researchers, teachers, technology professionals, entrepreneurs, and community leaders. One telling and quick example is that an ASMS emergency room doctor recently saved one of our teachers’ lives. Alabama invested in their education, and many of them are returning that investment to our state.
Other organizations have recognized what is happening at ASMS. Niche currently ranks ASMS as the number 1 public high school in Alabama and number 19 among more than 20,000 public high schools nationally. It also ranks ASMS number 1 in Alabama for STEM, college preparation, and magnet education. Earlier this year, the Alabama Legislature passed a resolution recognizing those achievements.
ASMS is proud of those rankings. But my school is even prouder of what they represent.
Alabama decided more than 35 years ago to create an exceptional public educational opportunity for young people with extraordinary academic interests and abilities. It made that opportunity available statewide, not just to students fortunate enough to live in a particular ZIP code. And it made the school tuition-free so that a family’s income would not determine whether a student could attend.
That is a very good Alabama story, and we want it told accurately.
The same principle applies beyond ASMS. When a successful school such as LAMP can move from the top of Alabama’s rankings to being unranked because a piece of data is missing, we should pay attention. Data systems should illuminate the work of our public schools, not accidentally make some of them disappear.
Technical reasons most probably explain these gaps. ASMS has an uncommon governance structure and a unique statewide mission. Those differences are real, and any national comparison should account for them appropriately. But different should not mean invisible.
I hope ASMS, the Alabama Department of Education, and our other state partners can work together to make sure every eligible Alabama public school is fully represented in the data used by national education organizations.
This is not about chasing a ranking. It is about making sure Alabama gets credit for what Alabama has built.
We have outstanding public schools. We have remarkable students. We have programs other states would be proud to call their own. When Alabama does something exceptionally well, we should make sure it counts.