<p>[America’s</a> Best High Schools 2010 - Newsweek](<a href=“http://www.newsweek.com/feature/2010/americas-best-high-schools.html]America’s”>http://www.newsweek.com/feature/2010/americas-best-high-schools.html)</p>
<p>The list is based on “Newsweek picks the best high schools in the country based on how hard school staffs work to challenge students with advanced placement college-level courses and tests.”
Some schools offer very few AP’s and do not allow to take college classes outside of school. Level of classses at schools like that might be much higher with some regular classes preparing for college better than APs at other schools.</p>
<p>made the list!!!</p>
<p>I am curious about what people on CC make of this list. </p>
<p>Some of the area schools that are on the list have dismal pass (3 or above) rates on the AP tests. It seems to me that simply offering the classes might make you a better school for some students, but overall it is a funny way to judge a school, I think.</p>
<p>My school also made the list!!</p>
<p>Let me say it this way</p>
<p>our students attend a very small rigorous private that didn’t make the list…</p>
<p>and several publics in the same city made the list–some high, some low…
and several of these publics with dismal GRADUATION rates are “on the list”
based on what? # of APs taken…</p>
<p>I promise you–you would NOT send your students to those publics if you had a choice …</p>
<p>I am stopping now before I say too much…</p>
<p>Ds’s school is on the list. The way I look at it: kind of bogus but better to be on than not, I suppose.</p>
<p>Our school is on the list (and the US News list), but I still take all rankings with a huge " grain of salt". I have to admit it may have helped my D with college admissions.</p>
<p>It once again confirms that S is in the wrong school district.</p>
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<p>This has been debated ad nauseam.</p>
<p>Although the list includes a number of oustanding schools, the methodology used by Jay Mathews aka the Education Moron-in-Chief is asinine. </p>
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<p>It is nothing more than an appraisal of the popularity of the AP and IB programs. Nothing more and nothing less than a farce.</p>
<p>This is more from the same guru:</p>
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<p>Is it dumb and is it a form of educational malpractice to prefer to send a great number of HS students to REAL colleges and take dual credit classes that automatically carry credits to local state universities? Is it really smarter to offer a lot of AP classes and push students to present exams they will NEVER pass or NEVER earn a meaningful credit? </p>
<p>If college experience is important, why give so much credit to courses that at best are WANNABE colleges courses taught by a faculty that might or might NOT be close to a college level. </p>
<p>We know that Mathews drank the AP/IB KoolAid with passion, but there should some limits. Somebody should send a memo to Washington to remind the guru that AP and surely IB are NOT college courses.</p>
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There were no privates on the list, because by and large privates are not interested in giving out objective data that lets them be judged.</p>
<p>My kids’ high school is typically ranked in the top 10 or 20 in the state by test scores and various local magazines that rank, yet didn’t make this list. So it is one isolated statistic, but I think it is a mistake to use that as a proxy for the quality of the whole school.</p>
<p>It’s a TERRIBLE way to judge a high school. </p>
<p>First, there’s the issue of how Nwk decides to omit certain schools. (At least it now lists them.) According to the FAQ, Nwk does this based on median SATs, which it says are the result of the “affluence of students’ parents.” Let me see if I understand this…Stuyvestant and Hunter College High School (both NYC public magnets) are NOT included because of this factor, but schools like Highland Park (Dallas) or North Shore (NY) or Rye (NY) are included. The latter have median family incomes WAY above those at NYC publics, so the rationale for exclusion is dubious, to say the least.</p>
<p>Even stranger is the fact that Stuyvesant is excluded, but Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech are not. This makes sense if you use median SAT scores to eliminate, but in reality it makes no sense at all. Bronx Science doesn’t make the list of America’s Best High Schools, but Brooklyn Tech does. Huh??!! (For those of you who don’t live in NYC, the admissions test is the same for all three high schools. You rank order your personal preferences. The cut off for Stuy is always the highest, Science,2d, Tech, 3rd. Nobody in NYC would claim that Tech is a much better high school than Bx Science. All 3 are selective, and the selectivity is Stuy, Science, Tech.) LOTS of selective admissions schools ARE on the list. Boston Latin is, for example. </p>
<p>So, the exclusion process is just plain strange. </p>
<p>Then we have the actual methodology. Reality is that not all APs are created equal. At schools which have regorous requirements for core courses, it’s harder to take APs. At schools which don’t, it’s easier, and lots of kids take “AP lite.” If high school A requires everyone to take a year each of biology, chemistry, and physics, so that students typically only take one AP science, that makes it a WORSE high school that one that requires only 2 years of lab science, and has lots of kids who take AP environmental science or AP psych instead of physics. Again, HUH?!!!</p>
<p>Moreover, this seems to be based on tests taken, so the schools that load up with one semester AP courses get a bonus. AP US government and AP comparative government; AP micro-and AP macro-econ are all one semester courses. Since the rating is based on tests taken, these semester courses count equally with full-year courses. That’s just plain nuts. Again, a high school in which lots of kids take AP Euro --a full year course–will get only half as many points as one where the same # of kids take one semester each of AP micro and macro ec. You know as well as I do that there are high schools under terrific pressure to get good rankings, and they ae going to push their students to take these semester courses to inflate their ranking. </p>
<p>Nwk claims that ALL college bound kids should be taking AP courses. The unfortunate reality is that it’s more important for kids to get the basics in high school. If you load up with AP lite instead of the rigorous basic courses, a lot of fields will already be closed to you when you start college. </p>
<p>Colleges are NOT more impressied by a course load which includes Ap env science, AP studio art, AP stat, AP psych, etc. INSTEAD of 4 years of math, science, English, social studies, and foreign language. The existence of the AP program distorts curriculum choices–kids think that college admissions officers are more impressed by this sort of course load than they are by a student who begins a second foreign language and does well in it, for example. And, should that student have the intention of getting a Ph.D. in the humanities, having begun the study of a second foreign language will be one heck of a lot more useful than AP psych. (Many Ph.D. programs require candidates to master at least two languages to an intermediate level. If that’s the direction you might want to go in, it is a good idea to begin the study of a second language in high school. A surprising # of kids don’t do this because this will affect their class rank or they think that colleges are more impressed by APs.)</p>
<p>Yes, these rankings are questionable, but so are their university rankings that so many CC followers swear by. Most people don’t understand the methodology, nor do they care to know about it, so the rankings become a great selling point.</p>
<p>My school, included on the list, just graduated 100% of its senior class.</p>
<p>ProudMom, you’re correct that many college rankings are questionable. However, the rankings pushed by Mathews are incredibly misleading since they focus on a SINGLE element. At least, college rankings attempt to incorporate various elements, albeit often with equally poor results. </p>
<p>However, assuming one reader enjoys the compiled list, should he or she not ask why the first pages are stuffed with schools of the great states of Texas and Florida? Are those states known to lead the nation in the PSAT rankings, or known for great academic achievements? Hardly! What they have been known for is having been leaders in adopting the AP and the IB when this boondoggle became one of the best sources to … pad a GPA. Do people in Texas love the IB and AP for its intellectual challenges? Perhaps, but surely not as much as the easy way to get a higher ranking and a path to the almighty top percentiles that lead to an automatic acceptance at the flagship school. </p>
<p>In addition, this type of lists compounds several problems facing high school students and their family. The message that the MOST APs must be good … after all look how many the BEST schools are offering! The reality is quite different. The explosion of AP is nothing but a cancer plaguing most of our high schools. The education provided by most AP is a mile wide and an inch deep … exactly what college is not, or at least should not be. </p>
<p>The best high schools should be measured for providing the best education to … high schoolers, and not for pretending to offer college courses. Instead of elevating the AP and IB program as Mathews does, his magazine should work to rein the explosion and help focus schools on what is essential. Right now, they not only fail miserably but add to the damage. And this for the sole purpose of selling a magazine. Shameful!</p>
<p>PS Regarding graduating 100% of a class … isn’t that something worth measuring? Since we know that the government has been fiddling with the numbers for years, would it not be nice for Mathews to poll the school and obtain the class sizes in the begin of 9th grade and track them for the next four years? Of course, we know that NO school official would admit that graduating 100% of a high school class should include comparing the entering 9th graders to the graduating class.</p>
<p>One of my kids completed an IB diploma program, and it was not a “mile-wide, inch-deep” experience. IB is not for everyone, and even those who like it are not thrilled with all aspects of it, but superficial is one thing it is not.</p>
<p>As for “AP lite” courses, I think they have their place. Both of my kids confirmed their interest in their intended college majors (economics for one, computer science for the other) by taking the AP courses in these subjects. And neither is an AP course that could be considered part of the academic core.</p>
<p>But I do get concerned when I see kids on these boards trying to figure out how to load up on APs and sacrificing the basics of a good high school education in the process. A typical example would be a student not taking physics or a fourth year of foreign language in order to take an AP elective. The “AP count” – and the weighting of GPAs in some high schools – actually encourages students to make unwise choices.</p>
<p>I did not allow my kids to sacrifice basics in favor of elective AP courses; they took those courses on top of a standard high school program. But many parents and students may not be as careful, and guidance counselors are often of no help.</p>
<p>my school is in the top 20… my whole district (5 high schools) are in the top 80</p>
<p>Most of these schools specialize in one area/charter/magnets. It hardly looks like they took into consideration just a neighborhood school…</p>
<p>Our school district has seven schools in the top 100. Five of them do not have magnet or other special programs that draw from outside their own districts. They are true neighborhood high schools – but the neighborhoods they serve are not typical. They are affluent areas, and some of them have heavy representations of Asian families who place a strong emphasis on academics. </p>
<p>A lot of the kids in these schools have been so accelerated academically from elementary school onward that they have finished all of the high school basics before senior year except for English (and in our district, you can take the two AP English courses as substitutes for English 11 and 12). Except for English, these kids could take an entire schedule of “AP lites” in their senior year without doing themselves any harm because they have already taken all the stuff they truly need.</p>
<p>jubilee the schools from my district are all neighborhood schools.</p>
<p>Belmont High School = best open enrollment high school in Massachusetts!</p>
<p>woohoo!</p>
<p>except I agree, the methodology is flawed but that doesn’t mean we’re still the best :)</p>