Fox Chapel Area School District was ranked first for its second year running.
A recent 2025 ranking of Pennsylvania school districts placed Fox Chapel Area School District first for the second year in a row, with six Pittsburgh-area districts placing in the top ten schools.
Fox Chapel is also the top scoring district in the statewide rankings, with Upper St. Clair School District falling right behind.
Lower Merion, Radnor Township, and Peters Township also fell in the top five on this year’s list of Statewide Public School District rankings. The top five held from last year’s rankings.
According to the ranking, the top ten school districts are: Fox Chapel Area, Upper St. Clair, Lower Merion, Radnor Township, Peters Township, Hampton Township, South Fayette Township, Unionville-Chadds Ford, Mt. Lebanon, and Tredyffrin-Easttown.
The North Hills and South Hills regions of Pittsburgh were represented in six of the top ten spots in the ranking.
A total of 482 of the Commonwealth’s 500 school districts are ranked. School districts with incomplete data are not ranked.
Pennsylvania System of School Assessment scores for math, English, and science, as well as Keystones for literature, algebra, and biology from the past three years are utilized in the formula to determine school district rankings.
Many districts had missing data from the 2022 biology Keystones, so that data point was excluded from the rankings.
Grades three through eight receive math and reading scores, with science scores being included for fourth, eighth, and the Keystones.
The recent rankings are based on a district’s percentage of students placing in the top two standardized test categories. That score is then compared to its departure from the average for the set.
The score is known as a standard score, or a “z-score”. The result is a measurement of the number of standard deviations a district scored above or below the mean for the data set being examined.
To complete the ranking, the z-scores for each component in a grade are summed to create a grade score. The sum of all the grade scores makes up a district’s overall score in the ranking.
