In Lists of Best High Schools, Numbers Don't Tell All

From Michael Winerip at the NYT.  For the full story go here.  Thanks Mr. Winerip!

This is the time of year when the lists of best high schools in the United States are published. For anxious consumers, the number of lists can be daunting, whether national in scope (U.S. News & World Report; The Washington Post; Newsweek and The Daily Beast) or local (Boston magazine; New Jersey Monthly; The Chicago Sun-Times).

No one in his right mind would take these lists lightly. Property values rise near best high schools. Parents will fight to the death for best high schools. Best teachers and best principals want to work in best high schools.

And:

What schools score highest on Newsweek’s index? Of the top 50, 37 have selective admissions or are magnet schools, meaning they screen students using a combination of entrance exam scores, grade-point average, state test results and assessments of their writing samples.

In short, to be the best, high schools should accept only the highest performing eighth graders, who — if the school doesn’t botch it — will become the highest performing 12th graders.

Put another way: Best in, best out, best school.

And:

At all costs, avoid Scarsdale, N.Y. It didn’t even make the top 1,000. Though its average SAT score of 1935 would rank it 21st among the 100 best, the school does not offer A.P. courses, and Newsweek counts A.P. data as 40 percent of the rating.

Why no A.P.? Scarsdale officials find that A.P. courses encourage students to go a mile wide and an inch deep, so the high school has created its own advanced courses. Instead of spending all their time working out of A.P. textbooks, students visit the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston and the Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park, N.Y., to do field research.

Two-thirds of Scarsdale seniors are accepted to colleges that the Barron’s Guide to the Most Competitive Colleges ranks as the “most competitive” in the country. Of course, Newsweek doesn’t own Barron’s, so it wouldn’t make any sense to use that as a criterion.

MCPS down to 1 in Newsweek top 100 High Schools Ranking

2012: 1 MCPS high school in the top 100


2011:  2 MCPS high schools in top 100
Eight MCPS High Schools Ranked among Newsweek’s Top 500 High Schools 


2010:  7 MCPS high schools in top 100
MCPS Has Seven Schools in Newsweek's Top 100 List


2009:  4 MCPS high schools in top 100
Newsweek Ranks Four MCPS High Schools in the Top 100 in the Nation

Native speakers ace AP language exams | Washington Examiner

Native speakers ace AP language exams Washington Examiner

...Brenda Willett, whose sons went through the Chinese immersion program at Montgomery's Potomac Elementary School, said part of the trend can be attributed to inadequate preparation at the elementary and middle school level. By the time her now-college-age son reached his junior year in high school, when students would consider the AP course, only a handful of nonnative speakers had been able to keep up. Asian students -- many of whom had been studying the language at home and outside of school since childhood -- filled in the vacant seats, Willett said.

"The kids who were ethnically Chinese were favored," Willett said. "The teacher felt that the immersion program had failed the other students."

For students, a passing score on the test can be used for college credit at most universities. But students are hardly the only beneficiaries. Major high school ranking systems created in the past decade rely almost exclusively on AP participation rates. Achievement aside, the more students who take the tests, the higher the school and school district rank.

And in the Washington region, a whopping 77 percent of schools ranked in the top 6 percent of schools nationwide, as measured by a recent ranking based on AP and similar test participation...