Jun 1, 2008

News magazine offers flawed school rankings

Guest Opinion

By Patrick Mattimore

If basketball games were scored the way Newsweek annually ranks high schools, winners would be determined, not by how many points they scored, but by how many shots they attempted.

The "best high schools" rankings were released recently by the magazine, and newspapers around the country are publicizing which local schools made the list of 1,300 schools. According to Newsweek, those schools are the top five percent of public high schools in the country. The schools are ranked according to a Challenge Index, which was developed by Jay Mathews, a Washington Post education reporter and contributing Newsweek editor.

Newsweek computes the index by taking the total number of Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB) or Cambridge tests given at a school and dividing by the number of graduating seniors. Passing rates on the tests are irrelevant. Students need not take AP courses to take AP tests.

Ranking high schools by how many tests the schools give is no more a valid yardstick of quality than ranking schools according to how many colors of paint they use on campus buildings. Without a corresponding performance measure, test administration is an empty calibration of academic excellence.

The rankings are not without their critics. Last year, Palo Alto and Gunn high schools in Palo Alto refused to supply raw data to Newsweek, although the schools have perennially appeared on the list. Education Sector, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank concluded after examining the rankings that many of the schools on Newsweek's list "do not meet a reasonable definition of a good high school."

Dissatisfaction with the rankings appears to be spreading. In April, Mathews reported in his weekly Washington Post column that he had received a letter announcing a boycott of the rankings signed by representatives of 39 school districts in five states.

The letter referred to Newsweek's ranking system as a "flawed methodology" and concluded that "it is impossible to know which high schools are 'the best' in the nation."

The "best" high schools are also getting smaller.

Basis Charter High School in Tucson and Dallas' School for the Talented and Gifted, the No. 1 and No. 2 ranked schools respectively, both have high school populations under 200 students. Hillsdale High in San Mateo is lauded in Newsweek because that school has divided its main campus into smaller "schools" for students and has also seen its "ranking" rise.

One of the top 20 schools, California's Eastern Sierra Academy, has 22 students and three teachers. About five students graduate from Sierra each year. When Newsweek began ranking schools 10 years ago, only three schools in the top 100 had graduating classes fewer than 100 students. On the 2008 list, there are 22 such schools.

While there may be some justification for developing smaller high schools that provide students more attention or dividing larger campuses the way Hillsdale has done, the rankings encourage pernicious student attrition policies, since the ranking metric is a combination of tests and graduating seniors. In other words, a school's index rises as a school either increases tests or decreases graduating seniors. So, for example, Basis Charter had 120 high school students but only 18 students graduated last year. While it is normal that all schools will have some dropouts between freshman and senior years, attrition rates at Basis Charter are the type you see at low-performing high schools, not at the country's supposedly best high school.

Other anomalies exist with regard to Newsweek's best list and classroom realities. The Center for Advanced Technologies (part of Lakewood High School), Pensacola High and Hillsborough Senior High are all in Florida and ranked in the top 50, but none of those schools had even 40 percent of seniors who passed a single AP test. The schools were all rated "C" or lower last year by Florida's Department of Education based upon school performance criteria. All three schools failed to make adequate yearly progress according to federal standards.

It is little wonder that our nation's high school students lag behind other industrialized nations on tests of educational competency. As long as we use substandard simplistic measures to judge schools by the quantity, but not the quality, of their output, we can expect a substandard product.



Patrick Mattimore taught social studies at South San Francisco High School from 1992 to 2002. He is a fellow at the Institute for Analytic Journalism.