I can't profess to know much about public high schools except that they weren't too good when I was a kid (thirty years ago), and while they appear to have gotten more layers of bureaucracy slathered on, the cirriculum is still watered-down and too overly-PC for anything of any great challenge or value to be learned there.
My kids are still at the elementary stage, and both are in the gifted programs there ("gifted" = standard cirriulum, imho). One more year to go, and if my oldest boy, age 10, can keep his grades up, he will be going to Pine View in Sarasota, which is indeed an excellent and very challenging place to be. My daughter will follow a year after him, at the rate she's going.
But my kids are lucky -- they are naturally smart (must be my wife's genes $;-), and have a solid mom and dad backing them up and pushing them forward day after day. For kids lacking that, from what I have personally observed, the "standard" public school educational fare is pathetic in the extreme.
The gifted, IB, magnet, AP programs can really help children excel. The problem is this: the study was tilted in favor of access to magnet programs (IB, AP, etc); the county has been putting magnets in poorly performing schools to boost rankings.
Here's the example, Oak Ridge HS offers magnet program for advanced students, however the school overall gets failing marks: 76% Sophmores at Oak Ridge failed the reading part of the FCAT.
Oak Ridge was caught cheating on the FCAT tests - they were dropping low-performing students from enrollment to artificially raise their test scores. It's one of 3 F-rate high schools in Orange county.
Another one (University) had a student stabbed to death on campus during a gang fight last year. The perp just got 60 years.
At any rate, I would take these school rankings with a grain of salt.