Newsweek's Top High Schools List is Off Base

Newsweek just released their much-hyped, bizarrely calibrated top U.S. high schools list . The formula, devised by Washington Post writer Jay Mathews, is a simple division of the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and Cambridge exams taken by students at the school by the number of graduating seniors. Essentially, the more students that take AP tests, the higher the school's score on the "Challenge Index." The top two schools, both located in Dallas, somehow have about 15 or more AP exams taken per graduating senior.

Scoring high on Mathews's Challenge Index has created an incentive for schools across the country to push students who have no shot at passing the exams into these high-intensity classes. On a large scale, kids reading below grade level are taking classes designed for above-grade-level students. You've got students that have great difficulty reading young adult books or writing complete sentences being assessed on independently reading novels like Jane Eyre and composing analytical essays on Bronte's style.

The argument that Mathews makes in an accompanying Newsweek piece is that AP classes are healthy "shock therapy" for lower-performing college-bound kids. I see his argument that a rigorous environment can be a motivator for some striving, low-skilled students to bump up their effort.

However, the widespread pushing of AP courses on struggling students -- with rewards of high scores on the "Challenge Index" -- is not in many students' best interest. I expect Mathews would view me as a stodgy defender of the status quo while he casts himself as a bold innovator. At least he quotes one dissenting voice from Professor J. Martin Rochester:

"Having failing students take AP courses as a solution to their academic struggles is like promoting a poor-hitting minor-league ballplayer to the New York Yankees in the hope that it will jump-start his career if he faces major-league pitching."

I'll go one better on the sports analogy; let's take the Boston Marathon. If you want to have a shot at finishing those 26.2 miles, let alone compete for a decent finishing place, it takes long-term training and serious dedication. If you are short on one of those two qualities, a surplus of the other may suffice to get you over the finish line. If you've got neither -- you're not in shape and you don't really want to do hardcore distance running -- then your school does you no favors by pressuring you to sign up for the race.

Rather than the single, reductive AP tests ÷ Graduates equation, one cloaked in the politically friendly rhetoric of "high expectations," there are far more comprehensive ways to measure excellence in high schools. There is a wealth of research in this area; discarding it all does the crucial discourse on how to help students a disservice.

Dan Brown is a high school teacher and the author of The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle.

Comments

[WholeTruthMA]

Newsweek's rankings have a HUGE serious flaw. Let's ignore that they focus on a single metric (AP exams taken), that they ignore whether the AP courses themselves are even taken, and whether the tests are passed. There's another flaw that (at least for some subset of schools) renders it even more meaningless.

Newsweek "take[s] the total number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests given at a school in May, and divide[s] by the number of seniors graduating in May or June."

If a school has a stable population, this metric (again ignoring its value) is at least internally consistent. But if not, the metric breaks down and make no sense. This calculation gives a tremendous advantage to schools whose populations dwindle over the four years (as often happens at many charters). Since the metric used is AP exams divided by graduating seniors, having younger students who take an exam (and counted in the numerator), but do not graduate (are not counted in the denominator) dramatically overinflates their metric.

E.g., a few the charters in the top 100 for which such data was readily available.
* Sturgis Charter Public (64 seniors, 108 freshmen)
* MATCH Charter (34 seniors, 94 freshmen)
* Mystic Valley Regional Charter (41 seniors, 97 freshmen)
* Peak to Peak Charter (97 seniors, 159 freshmen)

Population dwindling (which should be a HUGE negative, not a positive) acts to inflate a school's metric, and render it meaningless.

[majii]

I just recently retired after teaching high school for 33 years and have witnessed the push by my principal to increase the number of students taking AP classes. Many of the students who take these classes are ill-equipped to pass the class and score at least a 3 on the AP tests. Many of them fail the courses the first semester and then request a switch to a regular class in the following semester, but the principal refuses to change their schedules, causing them to fail the class for the entire school year. Then these students have to take the class over the following year at a lower level if it is in a core subject area. I agree that students need to be offered the opportunity to take more AP classes in high school, but diasgree that every student should be enrolled in them.

[Lisa McLoughlin]

It's a rare rare day when I agree with an article in the Huffington Post, but Dan Brown gets it right on Jay Mathews' Best High School's List. The List is a sham and nothing more than a marketing tool for AP and IB. School administrators hold up their precious Newsweek rankings to the public like they won a Pulitzer. This practice is most disturbingly obvious around budget time when they want the public to approve their overbloated budgets.

Furthermore, Jay's financial bias is never disclosed before each of these Lists and it really should be. Kaplan, which provides prep for AP and SAT is a subsidiary of the Washington Post and Newsweek and Jay co-authored a book called Supertest: How the International Baccalaureate Can Strengthen Our Schools with IBO's Deputy Director General Ian Hill, published by an IBNA board member.

www.truthaboutib.com

[mikeeco]

The results of the Newsweek list are always interesting. I agree that this may not be a perfect scale to figure out "The Best" schools in America. There should certainly be more criteria.

I do not necessarily agree that the results are irrelevant though. The fact that more schools are offering AP programs to a greater part of the population is a good thing. Of course, the trick will be to keep the course standards high while increasing the number of students who take the class and exams.

Just having high test scores does not indicate that a school is great. There are many factors that lead to higher test scores, the largest being a student/schools' socio-economic status. Those who have more typically do better. Does this mean that schools who have poorer students who do not test as high are doing worse, not necessarily. They often times have more to overcome and more to learn, so they may have indeed learned more, just not enough to do well on the exams. Educational growth should be thing that we look at to determine the a school is doing well, this is just very hard to measure.

So we are left with a list like this.

Mike - Total Registration, LLC
http://www.TotalRegistration.net - Helping high schools simplify the AP exam registration process by registering students for the exams online.

[tvmistake]

Thank you. This stupid list annoys me every year. Now I can just send people here, rather than subjecting them to my rants. How anyone can, in good conscience, call a high school good--much less the best--based on such an obviously limited if not outright flawed methodology is just beyond me. That lazy news producers never get tired of touting it is perhaps more understandable, given the sorry state of modern journalism.

[MNmommy]

Thank you for pointing out the fallacy of this measure.

I was once very proud that my daughter's prospective high school placed highly on this list - now I am aware that it was because the HS has an IB program (commendable) and offered the full array of AP tests. The school has long fallen off the top 1000 list, not because anything has significantly changed, but because districts across the country figured out the formula. It so silly - when the kids can essentially fail the AP tests and just the effort to take them is counted.

[MNmommy]

I spoke a hair too soon, her high school is back on the list - perhaps that's because it expanded to 1500. :)

[LeftRight]

Yeah, my old school has been going up the list.... now it's ranked 18. It was a really good school, but to rank it based simply on number of AP and IB tests taken??? Please.

[LeftRight]

While I agree with you, it's no different than many other ranking devices, such as showing MA as having a wonderful health insurance system, since almost everyone is covered, while ignoring the fact that many who are nominally covered are in worse shape than if they had NO insurance!