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Which is better: A high school that sends 66 percent of its graduates to four-year colleges or one that sends 33 percent? A high school whose average SAT scores are 499 on the verbal and 496 on math, or one with scores of 391 and 436?

Simple, right? It's the first one, the high school with the better college rate and higher SAT scores. Because isn't that what parents want in a high school, one that teaches their children well and sends them off to a good college?

Not to Boston magazine. The glossy monthly loves to rank things -- restaurants, ice cream, dry cleaners, you name it -- and its September edition tackles high schools in greater Boston. Using a Babson College professor's mind-numbing formula, Boston rated 150 public high schools and 62 private high schools in and around the Hub.

And the results?

Well, if you bleed Bombardier blue, not good. Of the 150 public high schools surveyed, Attleboro High School ranked 137th, or 14th from the bottom.

But I, for one, say AHS is getting a bad rap.

The magazine doesn't explain much about the formula used to come up with its rankings. It does say that student achievement counts for 70 percent of the score. The rest comes from things like per-pupil spending and student-teacher ratio, essentially what's spent on education.

If that's true, why did Attleboro High come out so poorly? It's hard to say.

In the example at the beginning of this column, AHS is the school which sent two-thirds of its seniors to four-year colleges and had combined SAT scores of nearly 1,000.

The other school? Chelsea High School.

You remember the Chelsea school system, right? The one so bad that the state had to take it over?

Chelsea sends half as many of its grads off to college and barely creeps over 800 on the SATs and it's a BETTER high school?

Let's compare Attleboro to similar communities.

Taunton High, for instance, has roughly the same SAT scores as AHS but sends just 43 percent of its grads to four-year colleges. Its ranking? 118, 19 places better than Attleboro. Methuen is a border community roughly the same size as Attleboro. Its SAT scores are 31 points below Attleboro's and its college rate is 14 percentage points less. Yet Methuen High is 13 spots higher than AHS.

Let's compare Attleboro to neighboring high schools. SAT scores at AHS are the area's lowest but not by much. And it sends roughly the same percentage of its grads to college as North Attleboro and King Philip, two far more upscale school systems with few of the bilingual and urban problems Attleboro has to face.

Where AHS gets hurt is in the money spent on education. Attleboro's student-teacher ratio of 15.9-to-1 is the second highest in the magazine's survey. Its per-pupil spending ($6,854) is on the low side although three area school systems -- North Attleboro, Mansfield and Norton -- are all lower. It seems to me that AHS is getting punished in this ranking because the cost of education in this section of Massachusetts is, logically, less than it is closer to Boston.

Besides, isn't it far more important what you get out of the school than what you put into it? Doesn't Attleboro's SAT and college rates say that the AHS faculty and students are doing a pretty good job?

Oh, it's just a magazine article, you might say. Who cares?

Well, real estate agents will tell you that the quality of a community's school system is near the top of the list of parents' concerns. An apparently off-base ranking could certainly scare away many prospective home buyers.

Besides, it's just not right. Boston magazine's rankings put AHS below Durfee High, below Lowell High, below Brockton High. Have the editors of this magazine ever been to these schools? Compared the conditions? Would any parents in their right mind rather send their child to Chelsea or Durfee or Brockton rather than Attleboro High?

You might note that this complaint is coming from a Bishop Feehan High School graduate and a lifelong North Attleboro resident. I haven't exactly been over the Attleboro side of the football field too often, you might say. And I've used this space in the past to poke fun at the Blue Bombardiers' lack of gridiron success and the underlying reasons for their failures.

But, as I said, this just isn't right. I know I would be upset if I were a faculty member or a student at AHS.

And if I were them, I'd say one thing to the folks at Boston magazine: Stick to ice cream and dry cleaners.

MIKE KIRBY is managing editor of The Sun Chronicle. Contact him at 508-236-0335 or at mkirby@thesunchronicle.com.