Orono High School was named last week as Maine’s ninth best high school in a study announced by US News and World Report.

To produce the 2014 U.S. News & World Report Best High Schools rankings, that magazine teamed up with the Washington, D.C.-based American Institutes for Research, one of the largest behavioral and social science research organizations in the world.

AIR implemented the U.S. News comprehensive rankings methodology, which is based on the key principles that a great high school must serve all of its students well, not just those who are college bound, and that it must be able to produce measurable academic outcomes to show the school is successfully educating its student body across a range of performance indicators.

According to US News and World Report, the methodology used in the 2014 Best High Schools rankings was unchanged from the 2013 edition. It started out by analyzing 31,242 public high schools in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. That number was reduced to 19,411 schools, which is the total number of public high schools across the country that had high enough 12th-grade enrollment and sufficient data from the 2011-2012 school year to be eligible for the rankings.

A three-step process determined the Best High Schools. The first two steps ensured that the schools serve all of their students well, using performance on state proficiency tests as the benchmarks. For those schools that made it past the first two steps, a third step assessed the degree to which schools prepare students for college-level work.

The top ranked Maine school in the report was the Maine School of Science and Mathematics in Augusta, which also was rated the 14th best high school in the entire nation.