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Marlette and Sandusky high schools were among 1,086 high schools in 40 states that were awarded bronze medals by the magazine.

The magazine rated 18,790 public high schools using a system developed by School Evaluation Services, a K-12 education data research business run by Standard & Poor's.

According to the magazine's Web site, the key to the rating is that "a great high school must serve all its students well, not just those who are bound for college".

"Teachers take an interest in the success of each and every student, that effort is shown in how our students have performed recently," stated Marlette High School Principal Dale Moore.

"I hope this is not where we stop, we need to keep going forward. We are looking at changes around the school to offer more opportunities. I hope they (students) take the challenge also," Moore said.

"It shows a lot of what we're doing in the Thumb when Sanilac and Huron did so well," he added, referring to work the schools from the two counties are doing together. Four Huron County schools received bronze ratings.

"Sandusky High School received the bronze medal because the staff has done an excellent job in maintaining scores above the state average in the state's tests for reading and math in spite of our declining economy," said Martha Essenmacher, superintendent of Sandusky Community Schools.

"Families in our community have been significantly impacted by Michigan's economic challenges. Our Free and Reduced (lunch) counts have almost doubled in the last ten years. Despite hard times, our community continues to support our schools. We are passionate about learning for all students."

She added, "If the ranking would acknowledge dual enrollment (in high school and college courses), rather than just AP courses, we may well have met the criteria for gold.

"The Sandusky teaching staff should be given the most credit for this award," said Tom Lukshaitis, the district's director of at-risk programs. "However, our high school's Success Program has to be given some of the credit for the reaching of the bronze level. Our high school instructional aides are very dedicated to the students who come from lower income households. I believe in many cases, the instructional aides relate better and listen better to students who come from low income families."

This year's ranking is based on 2005-2006 data and used a three-step process to determine the best high schools.

The first two steps used state proficiency standards to measure how well students did in public schools that go through grade 12 and had enough data to analyze.

According to the Web site, "the criterion for the first step is probably the hardest for schools to meet - outperforming statistical expectations compared with other schools within their state".

The firm compared high schools within each state by calculating how well the students should do on state reading and math tests based on each school's ratio of student poverty. School performance had to significantly higher than expected in order to meet the first of two requirements for a bronze medal.

According to the Web site, 56.9% of Marlette's student body is economically disadvantaged and 39.1% of Sandusky's. Marlette's student enrollment also includes 4.6% minority students while Sandusky has 3.5% minorities.

Next the firm determined whether a school's low income and minority students were performing better than the average for other minority and low income students in the state on the MEAP reading and math tests.

The magazine also recognized 13 Michigan schools as silver medal winners, but there were no gold medal winning schools in Michigan.

The firm used advanced placement performance to pick the gold and silver winners.

They determined which schools produced the best college readiness for the highest percentage of their students by weighing the average advanced placement participation rate with how well students did on the AP tests.

The top 100 high schools nationwide earned gold medals. The next 405 high schools received silver medals.