To heck with the Newsweek high school rankings - Page 2

lastminutemom196 · 10-21-2009, 06:08 AM

Our high school as well. On the Newsweek List for number/percentage of kids in AP classes but African American students failed in math and language arts again -- so no AYP. I actually think our high school does a crummy job for kids in the middle so I think the not making AYP is richly deserved.

I think the Bush administration folks sold Kennedy on the fact that situations that were hidden at high schools like ours, would be smoked out. I don't think he understood their true intentions.

What I believe that many expected to happen was when suburban schools like ours (both middle and high) failed AYP repeatedly, that parents would demand vouchers. What I have seen, and what I don't think they counted on, was that parents clearly understood that this wasn't about their kids. Their kids were doing fine, the school is fine, etc.

I agree that the Newsweek list is a joke as well.

FallGirl · 10-21-2009, 08:19 AM

Quote:

What I believe that many expected to happen was when suburban schools like ours (both middle and high) failed AYP repeatedly, that parents would demand vouchers. What I have seen, and what I don't think they counted on, was that parents clearly understood that this wasn't about their kids. Their kids were doing fine, the school is fine, etc.

What I see is the parents of middle and high school students "getting this", but I sometimes talk with parents of younger children who seem to get very wound up about this.
Our MS did not make AYP in math recently and I had to explain to them that my child who is a student there has had excellent math classes.

happymomof1 · 10-21-2009, 08:39 AM

Happykid's school has been on the Newsweek list practically since the list's inception, and this year failed AYP because of the scores of Special Ed. students. I can't remember whether it failed last year as well. The Special Ed. parents (and teachers) are ticked off, not because the kids aren't learning and progressing, but because the way they are evaluated is inappropriate. However, the teachers are stuck with it.

It is hard to argue with Jay Mathews' original intent for the Newsweek list which was to show that when students are encouraged to take tougher classes, they will, and that when teachers hold students to higher standards, students will rise to those standards. However, it is all too easy for high school communities to turn this into an AP arms race, and to lose focus on the goal of lifting all boats - most especially, lifting the sinking ones.

mantori.suzuki · 10-21-2009, 10:18 AM

Newsweek tacitly admitted that their rankings are bunk when they created the separate list of "public elites". This is a list of schools that are clearly among the best in the nation, but which don't make the regular list because the kids just don't take very many AP tests. Or, to put it another way, the Newsweek methodology fails to identify the best schools. So why bother?

My son's school used to be one of the "public elites". Now it doesn't appear anywhere on that list or in the regular rankings. But their statistics have hardly changed. So who is deciding which schools belong on which list? It's all a bunch of crap designed to sell magazines. At least with the US News college rankings, even though they are also crap to a great extent, you can usually look at the relative positions on the list and say, "Yeah, that makes a bit of sense."

johnshade · 10-21-2009, 10:37 AM

"This is a list of schools that are clearly among the best in the nation, but which don't make the regular list because the kids just don't take very many AP tests."

No -- they don't make the list because they have a selective admissions process and therefore aren't considered (by Newsweek) to be comparable to the other schools. At the one "public elite" with which I am most familiar, the students take tons of AP tests.

missypie · 10-21-2009, 10:45 AM

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The reason is that they are schools that host excellent magnet programs where kids take tons of APs and do well -- but the non-magnet portion of the school is failing.

The magnet schools in Dallas are almost always in top 5 in the country. I think the TAG magnet has been No. 1 for several years in a row. But the ordinary public schools are quite bad.

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One year our middle school made the list because one too many Hispanic students failed to show up on test day.

That happened to our HS last year..and we were two minority kids shy on test day!
(Of course, even having a "minority" category is ridiculous - some of these minorities are kids of retired pro athletes who live in multi million dollar houses.)

missypie · 10-21-2009, 10:52 AM

For years our HS just couldn't break into the top 100 on the Newsweek list...perpetually in the 105-120 range. When Son was a freshman, they started having the brighter freshman take AP Human Geo (instead of pre-AP Geography). Lo and behold, the rankings came out the next year and we were in the top 100! I emailed the principal that she should send everyone of those freshman (sophomores by then) a thank you note because they had made it possible for her to get into the top 100.

AP classes are pushed way too much at our HS. Son took 11. D is on track to take 9 but with the way this year is going, she may end up win only 6. I've learned my lesson. Younger D will take very few.

mantori.suzuki · 10-21-2009, 11:05 AM

One would expect Newsweek's published statements on the subject of "public elites" to be more authoritative than our speculations.

From 2009: "NEWSWEEK's Challenge Index is designed to recognize schools that challenge average students. These top-performing schools, listed below in alphabetical order, were excluded from the list of top high schools because, despite their exceptional quality, their sky-high SAT and ACT scores indicate they have few or no average students."

From 2007: "NEWSWEEK excluded these high performers from the list of America's Best High Schools because so many of their students score well above the avarage on the SAT and ACT."

No mention of competitive admissions, and not much of an explanation at all, really.

roshke · 10-21-2009, 11:11 AM

An old CC thread on this topic - still relevant:

NYT article "blasting" Newsweek high school rankings

Quote:

Originally Posted by me

... Jay Mathews is fully aware that these rankings are bogus. His straightforward agenda, and if you read what he says it's obvious, is to promote the access of AP classes in poor neighborhoods. That's the reason he gives for not counting the scores. From Newsweek's FAQs of this year:

Quote:
Alameda, CA: Your ranking is amazingly one-dimensional, since anyone can take and fail the AP exams...why not at least include percentages of takers who get scores of 3 and 4-5?
Jay Mathews: Ah, great question, which gets to the heart of why I decided to rate schools by participation, not scores. Most schools restrict access to AP. I hope I have shown how bad that is. But when you ask them about their AP program, they say, We're great! 90 percent of our kids passed the AP test! What they don't tell you is that they only let about two dozen kids take AP, their A students, and so the results were foreordained. It is a scam, and the list is designed in part to expose it.
Last year someone asked, then why call this list the Best High Schools, why not just say, a list of high schools that are providing access to higher level classes. His answer? Attention on the newstands!

The FAQs from last year was selectively "edited" just before this year's list came out. In one Q, someone was reaming him out for the significance of the rankings and he comes out and actually says that he is "slightly ashamed" of the ranking aspect of the list. You're apparently not supposed to make any distinction there but just to note that a particular school is on the list, period.

Again, though, his mission is to advocate for a model a la the movie Stand and Deliver, based on the successful experience of a superlative math teacher, Jaime Escalante with a group of inner city kids sent to summer school for remedial math. This model was Mathews inspiration, and he wrote a book about Garfield High and what they accomplished there. So his goal is to raise the standards of American education - from the bottom up.

Bottom line is I have no issue with Mathew's ends , it's his misleading means to which I object.

And from the last part of the NY Times article linked in the beginning of that thread -this pretty much tells it like it is :

Quote:

(Mathews) said he doesn't factor in how students actually do on the AP tests, because then schools would let only top students take AP tests. "I know those schools you mention in Florida and California with the high failure rates have lots of problems," he said, "but at least this recognizes they're doing something right."

And that makes them the best in America? "I would have preferred we call the list the most challenging schools, the schools trying to reach as many kids as possible," he said. "But I will defend 'Best.' 'Best' is a very elastic term in our society."

mantori.suzuki · 10-21-2009, 12:50 PM

I imagine "best" was Newsweek's choice, not his. At least he's being honest about what he wants to achieve and not trying to pull the wool over our eyes with bogus statistics and secret formulas.

SlitheyTove · 10-21-2009, 01:19 PM

So nice to know D1's school isn't the only one in this situation.

roshke, thanks for that NYT link, lots of interesting discussion. There was a link in the CC discussion to a listserv dialogue between Matthews and a NJ HS principal. I think Matthews really needs to take AP Statistics.

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most particularly, as far as research goes, the UC and NCEA reports of AP in Calif and Tex that show significant correlation between getting a good grade on an AP test and higher graduation rates. You can't get a good grade on an AP test, except in a tiny number of cases, unless you take the course and the tests, so schools that restrict access are standing in the way of higher college grad rates, as least based on that research.

Augh, no, no, NO, repeat after me, correlation IS NOT causation!!!! Sheesh! The kids who are getting higher grades on AP tests might have done just fine in college without taking AP tests, and the kids who got low grades on AP tests might just be lousy at formal academics.

Matthews goes on to ask

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Lastly, given all this, and i really want to hear yr thoughts because i think this is the heart of yr argument, but i am not getting it yet, what harm can come from removing the barriers to AP and IB participation and letting all students, as Garfield did, take AP if they want to? What harm can come from letting motivation be the entry ticket? All the kids I have followed, and that is a lot of kids in two decades and three books, say that it helped them to make that struggle. And yet the vast majority of US high schools restrict access, and for reasons that they rarely even review or subject to debate.

Garfield meaning Jaime Escalante and "Stand and Deliver". Some of the Garfield students were self-motivated, but many more derived their motivation and work ethic entirely because of Escalante. Take those same kids and put them in an AP class taught by an average, or even above-average teacher, and the entire experiment would have imploded. Though I'll have to go hunt up Matthews' book, read his arguments, and see how he addresses the teacher part of the equation.

If Matthews really wants to achieve open access to APs in schools, a better statistic would be % of graduating seniors who've taken at least one AP test.

NJres · 10-21-2009, 04:13 PM

If the Newsweek ranking had any validity at all (which I doubt) it was good for 1 year only. After the first year I do think there was a lot of manipulation by HS to improve their raw score. It is easy to sign kids up for AP tests whether they are prepared to take them or not.

johnshade · 10-21-2009, 05:31 PM

"No mention of competitive admissions, and not much of an explanation at all, really."

You're right, it isn't much of an explanation. In fact, the way they achieve "sky-high" SAT/ACT scores is through competitive admissions. Mathews used to be more up-front about this, at least in the Washington Post, where this nonsense started out.

mantori.suzuki · 10-21-2009, 06:01 PM

So none of the schools in the rankings have competitive admissions?

johnshade · 10-21-2009, 06:13 PM

It's possible that some schools in the rankings do have competitive/selective admissions, but do so on the basis of criteria that don't result in unusually high SAT/ACT scores. An example might be arts magnet programs. These schools wouldn't be excluded, and indeed I think there are a few on the raked list, though I haven't looked at the listed schools closely this last year.

So I was a little overbroad in suggesting that schools with competitive admissions are all excluded; however, the converse, that all excluded schools have competitive admissions, is pretty much true. There are a few publics that have announced that they are de-emphasizing APs, like Scarsdale, but that's not the criterion for the "public elite" list.