Charter schools and Granite and Jordan school districts have the highest-ranked schools in the state, according to rankings recently released by the Sutherland Institute.

This month the institute launched what leaders call a new and improved version of a Web site that stacks both private and public schools against each other, allowing the public to view the status of their schools outside of just standardized test scores.

"We feel it is essential to parents to have some sort of clearinghouse to look at schools in their area and compare them one to another — the end result is choosing the best schools for their children," said Katie Christensen, public relations manager for Sutherland.

She said utahschools.org is the largest independent clearinghouse of Utah school information.

"Utah has taken a giant leap in behalf of parental control of education," said Paul Mero, president of Sutherland Institute. "Sutherland believes parents are responsible for their children's education and that the state's role in education is primarily as a support to parents."

In ranking the schools researchers looked at factors such as standardized test scores from the 2005-06 school year, college prep rankings based on the number of students that take the ACT, average ACT scores and graduation rates. They also looked at environment rankings based on the extra services a school offers as well as factors such as class size, tutoring services, parent organizations and extracurricular activities.

The Web site also includes private schools, ratings of which are not available through the State Office of Education.

Sutherland leaders said that with the passage of school voucher legislation, which will give Utahns private school vouchers from $500 to $3,000 based on income, the site will become more valuable and critical.

For the group's rankings of all schools in Utah visit utahschools.org.

The Sutherland Institute is a conservative public policy think tank committed to shaping Utah law and policy.

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E-mail: terickson@desnews.com