Matt Di Carlo takes a close look at the Newsweek and US News high school rankings and finds that they don’t tell you much about school quality. The information is self-reported. Only about half the high schools responded. The measures favor schools in affluent districts or schools with selective admissions.
This echoes what I heard from a reporter in Arizona. Two charter high schools are at the top end of the US News ratings. One has a tough selection process, accepting only accomplished students. The other requires that students take the AP courses so beloved by the magazine, so it has a high attrition rate.
Bottom line: a good school, as judged by US News, is a selective school that does not accept or retain average or low-performing students.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am beinning to think that no rating or reporting means much in terms of a school. It’s like finding a spouse. Would you pay attention to a rating? No. You find what works for you and you invest yourself to make it work for you. You give back. You understand give and take. You understand being part of a whole.
Ratings are. . .over-rated. 🙂
“It’s like finding a spouse. Would you pay attention to a rating?”
Well said.
Interesting…kinda like trying to compare school test scores??!!
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Diane,
Although I agree with your point about selective schools, charters, and affluent areas, there are some schools, such as mine, that do not fall into these categories. New Milford High School (NJ) is doing great things as we have great students and teachers. There is a focus on providing our students with essential skills sets and authentic learning opportunities to inspire a love of learning and foundation for success beyond high school. I’d like to think we are anything but a typical comprehensive high school. We are a blue-collar community, very diverse (parents speak over 40 different languages), and educate any and all students in our district. We even created our own Academies to raise the bar for all students, regardless of academic ability.
Eric,
I have no doubt that there are outstanding schools that are not selective. The point of the post was that the US News rankings are of dubious meaning because they do not recognize that some schools reach the targets chosen by US News because they are selective.
The rankings, self reported at that, are absolutely meaningless, arbitrary and serve only to “exalt” those in the upper socioeconomic classes. We should all bow down before them. Joanna B. has it pegged.
“We even created our own Academies to raise the bar for all students, regardless of academic ability.” Eduspeek (yes, to rhyme with geek) at its finest.
National rankings of traditional public high schools has never made much sense to me because it does not give students very much information that is useful for the actual decisions they have to make.
I am always suspicious of schools that boast of their rankings on their websites. It makes me suspect a lot of sizzle but no steak.
I’ve definitely found that those who self promote in public education rise high in the hierarchy. You are correct about “a lot of sizzle but no steak” as they spend their time self promoting instead of the actual down to earth, day to day grunt work of teaching students.
As reported by DiCarlo here are the six “grading” criteria: “The rankings are calculated using six measures:
graduation rate (25 percent)
college acceptance rate (25)
AP/IB/AICE tests taken per student (25)
average SAT/ACT score (10)
average AP/IB/AICE score (10)
the percentage of students enrolled in at least one AP/IB/AICE course (5).”
Yep, definitely will sort and separate by socio-economic class. My high school, in a rural poverty district would fair poorly by those “measures” (and I’m not sure I’d call them measures but “counts”)
This is why some schools load kids into AP classes even if they are not advanced students. Smoke and mirrors.
Do you think mixing advanced and non-advanced students together in an AP class is bad for the advanced students? Bad for the non-advanced students?
TE,
I think AP classes by definition are for advanced students. Mixing ability levels too much leads to an academically diluted class that becomes indistinguishable from other classes.
I prefer not to teach AP in my subject, due to the heavily prescribed curriculum and the overemphasis of the test. In my subject AP is just teaching to the test and test prep. I instead offer concurrent college enrollment classes for my upper level classes, which earns student college credit, but puts the focus back on the class itself rather than the College Board test at the end, and preserves my professional autonomy better.
Do you think since David Coleman (common core architect) is now on the College Board that AP courses and tests will eventually mimic the Common Core State Standards?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/education/david-coleman-to-lead-college-board.html?_r=0
And how will this benefit him and his organization:
http://www.achievethecore.org/about-student-achievement-partners/principles-work/
How is that education seems to be undergoing a top-to-bottom overhaul – based on oft-repeated and misleading data – driven by a carefully selected CORPS of “experts” and will lead to total usurpation of public schools and children, and by extension, parental/local desires and funding by the Federal Government? Who gave these Social Engineers the keys to the kingdom? What exactly is the end-product they are trying to turn our children into?
This week, the violation of civil rights undertaken by our Federal Administration drew the ire of the public. Fast forward, in the future, our children will not even understand when their rights are violated.
Some states and districts have similar components to their own accountability systems. Much of the above is mimicked in the Houston Independent School District ASPIRE or incentive system with additional components such as VAM. And as others have noted, chasing the US News, Newsweek and Ed Blue Ribbon leads to enlarging AP enrollment requiring all kids to take an AP class regardless of their ability level. The weighting of enrolled v. Passing Rate leads to some curiosities and after hours tutoring and exiting or attrition at the extreme. The more ribbons, medals add up to more press and a more selective population and more medals and more press and a more select population, etc., etc.
Those that do get sent to back to their home school see that school struggle.
These ratings are less reductionist than the letter grades some states hand out, but they are equally flawed. HSs that chose to not offer AP courses or IB because their teachers prefer to design their own courses for advanced students are effectively penalized as are the small rural schools as Duane Swacker points out… The irony is that the most important qualities of a school elude measurement. In small rural schools the students are known by all teachers and they can therefore get a much more personalized education than students who are a name-and-number in large “comprehensive” high schools. Schools who opt out of AP and IB courses often have a cadre of imaginative and resourceful teachers who are passionate about their subject area and pass that passion for learning along to their students.
These rankings are utter nonsense, just like the college ones are. They say little about the transformatiive capacity of the schools – their effectiveness in enriching the lives and promoting the development of the children they serve. On the other hand, schools that serve a subgroup of children – the talented, those with special needs, or those with particular interests (or aptitudes say in arts, stem, sports, etc.) serve a purpose and have important role to play in the mixture of schools our children need and deserve. Comprehensive schools can’t do everything right (even if they were funded right). Schools for talented minority students, for example, are desperately needed as they get bumped from the highly selective magnet schools like Bronx Science, and they do not get the attention or academic opportunities they deserve in comprehensive public schools.
I agree that there is much to be gained by having schools do more specialization than is typically allowed with traditional geographically zoned public schools.
DiCarlo does suggest however that the rankings may be useful for parents who are deciding which high school they want their child to attend. A parent doesn’t necessarily care if the school is doing a good job of teaching struggling students. They may simply want rigorous programs and a student population of high achievers.
This raises a question i don’t often hear from education thinkers. If we belive that school choice is wrong, should we also believe it is wrong for affluent parents to move to a neighborhood based on whether the schools are good or not?
This is a question I have often asked here, and in general the answer has been that it is only wrong for families to use public funds to make choices about schools. If a family uses it’s own resources to buy into a catchment area for an excellent traditional public school or purchase a private school education, that is fine.
Choice is not a useful concept in education. Suppose I tell you that the very best high school in town is the FDR School of Excellence. It has room for 480 students and it has 480 students enrolled. It is best because it happens to be in the most affluent part of town, and all the parents there are college educated, and their children start ninth grade with every advantage. So they take lots of AP courses, get high SAT scores, etc. How does help parents who don’t live in that district?
Why not a good public school in every neighborhood? Isn’t that a worthy goal?
It seems that this won’t happen until we have more mixed-income neighboorhoods. Is education an issue of real estate? Are there countries that educate their kids well but have ghettos?
Choice is not especially useful in traditional public education which is why I commented above that the ranking of traditional public high schools does not make much sense. It is more relevant for non-traditional public schools and post secondary education.
I like these rankings:
http://www.businessinsider.com/most-expensive-private-schools-2012-9?op=1
BASIS has other advantages that inflate their results. If you go to their web site and the course sequence section, they usually have their kids take multiple years of a course before the exam.
http://basistucsonnorth.org/course-sequences
I’m a Social Studies teacher and if you check out the above, a kid takes 2 years of World History then the exam. Frankly, I think it’s problematic to have 8th graders taking an AP exam. The same multi-year grooming seems to be true if you look at Economics.
What Post-AP anything is is beyond me as that is not approved by the College Board that I know of. Nor is AP-Alt. There is CB approved Pre-AP but the others? The other discipline areas seem to be the same.
If you have a select population and put them through years of streamed classes before the AP classes and exams, you should get good results.
The thing that gets my goat is that Arizona and many of the cities that BASIS serves are in some case near majority Hispanic cities. Why there isn’t a Hispanic kid featured on the Student Q & A portion of the Tucson site is problematic at best. The kids show up for the other schools as well.
That just isn’t right.
I agree with Joanna Best. As we watch the pendulum swing wildly between varying methods-of-the-day, some “conservative”, some “liberal”, it is becoming increasingly clear that high quality teaching comes from dedicated, well-trained and thoughtful teachers with principals, central administration, and school boards that give guidance and resources, and then get out of the way and allow them to do their jobs.
Education is not a political football, no matter what politicians think. And education is not rankable, because the ultimate goal of education is to provide EACH and EVERY individual student with as many of the tools needed to be successful, that we can provide for them, once they walk out of our doors. An education that does not do that is not worth the paper we give them when they walk away, nor is it worth the rankings of disconnected reporting entities, whether newspapers, ACT/SAT, or state/federal organizations.
DIane,
It would be great to read (more?) posts on your favorite nonselective schools in New York City along with the reasons that you think they are so good.
Ken, the nonselective public schools that I know best are the ones that are in my neighborhood: PS 8 in Brooklyn Heights; PS 29 in Cobble Hill; PS 321 in Park Slope. The principals are dedicated, experienced, and energetic. The teachers are also, with a good mix of veterans and younger teachers. The school is a happy place.
My neighborhood school was rated at A one year, then an F the next year. That’s when I realized how idiotic the school grades are.
I am sure there are hundreds more wonderful nonselective public schools in the city.
Thanks!
From InsideSchools, these sound like really good schools. Best I can tell, though, all three are predominantly white, wealthy, elementary schools in the richest parts of Brooklyn.
I’d be curious to read more about your favorite nonselective schools that have populations more similar to the charter schools that you are highly skeptical of.
Although I have friends who teach at those Chicago public schools that were “ranked” in the magazines, all of them would humbly admit that the game is rigged. When my eldest son Dan went to Chicago’s Whitney Young Magnet High School in Chicago (the alma mater of Michelle Obama, by the way, although when she comes to town she usually goes to hype some charter school), he was able to take any of more than a dozen Advanced Placement courses, beginning in 10th grade (no students could take the courses there in 9th grade then). As a result, he was able to take Statistics and both calculuses, plus the range from English (both) to the sciences, etc., etc., etc. But that was because Whitney Young selects the top 600 applicants from all the eighth graders in Chicago (public, private, other). As a result, they can offer those classes year after year after year and build a faculty based on those offerings.
But none of the Whitney Young teachers (many my friends then, and some still now) would proclaim that ranking was “proof” that they were “better” than the general high schools where I taught (by choice) during my 28 years in Chicago’s public schools.
So when I taught at Amundsen High School, we had to work very hard to assemble an Advanced Placement English Lit class. Why? Because virtually all of the “top” kids (by test score and economic class) had been creamed by the selective enrollment high schools (including Whitney Young), leaving us at Amundsen with those who were either left behind — or who came from immigrant families that didn’t know how to navigate the game yet.
It took us a couple of years to build a solid AP Lit program for the small number of juniors and seniors who were motivated for it. We placed them in the class ignoring test scores, by the way. The standardized test scores were such a poor measures of what our kids were ready for that they had to be the last thing we looked at. For the immigrant kids (often refugees from some of the nastiest wars on Earth), many had devoted an enormous amount of time to getting to Chicago and mastering English, but they could not (yet) score very high on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills “English” version yet (those years, it was the high school version of the ITBS — the TAP — that was functional).
In order to make the program work, we had a rigorous summer reading list, conducted by mail if we couldn’t “afford” summer school. Four books. We were in contact by mail and phone if we weren’t in class. But by September, all the “kids” knew they wanted to be there, or had made the “choice” to do another English class. Because the work got more difficult in September when we began the “real” school year.
But even with that reality, at Amundsen we were never able to offer more than a handful of AP classes to a handful of the kids. And I had to tell the “English” kids (and their parents, who were always part of the deal) that even with a year of our AP English, it would be rare if they could score a 4 or 5 on the exam. We were playing catch up. But — I told them I would guarantee that if they did the class they would find the toughest freshman “English” class at any college or university easy, or at least not fatal — including at my alma mater, the University of Chicago. And they could track me down later if that weren’t true.
I also told them that they’d find some silliness in college. Our long winter book was “Anna Karenina.” And a lot of prejudiced professors would not believe that a kid (usually, minority) who had graduated from a general Chicago high school could have read — actually, mastered — Tolstoy’s masterpiece.
It’s sad that things have only gotten worse in the years since then, with the fetishes about ratings and rankings becoming even more odious. The kids we serve in our general public high schools then and now come from all over, and part of the “Give us your tired, your poor…” promise of the USA is that we have public schools, as Diane has so eloquently defended, both in the “Death and Life…” and since, including here. There was never a way that at schools like Amundsen High School in Chicago — or all the other general high schools where I taught, Marshall and Manley, DuSable and Bowen, and on and on and on — that we could “compete” in that silly Newsweek and U.S. News “Race To The Top.”
But until we became targets for corporate “reform” based on the odious score cards of the “Race To The Top” crowd, we could proudly point to what we were doing — the fundamental work of democracy and the American promise, not the perversions of it we’ve been fighting against here in Chicago of late. Those kids who came to us from Eritrea and Thailand, from Vietnam and Bosnia, from Romania and Guatemala and all over weren’t going to get us into those odious rankings, but we were already at the “top” as far as being true to the real American Dream. And during the years they would return and thank us, we could always point out that.
That’s why, today, Chicago’s teachers and parents are so united against these monstrous plans and projects. From our “top” schools to our “bottom” schools, we know what is important — what’s of value — and what isn’t. And once again this Friday, when we vote to re-elect us (that’s CORE, led by Karen Lewis), we will be sending the same message out from Chicago. Those bad old days of “No Child Left Behind” and “Race To The Top” are over. They were always a form of treason to the best in this country, and now we are moving towards bringing us back to the …Life of the Great American School System.
The problem is that you have sociopaths running most large to medium size districts. Just look at N.Y., LAUSD, Chicago and D.C. for example. Students are the last thing on their mind. They put up every roadblock to stop public participation and every scummy game in the book in their board meetings. We just watched a lot of it yesterday again at LAUSD. After stopping Barr and Deasy at Venice High School and their understanding that we were going to go after that school with a Parent Trigger by parents, students, teachers and community they used a lawsuit by a Westchester Charter to go around everyone without notice in closed session and the minute it was passed in the closed session noticed the principal that it was a done deal. NO PUBLIC INPUT OF ANY KIND. This is the “New World Order.” Their general counsel’s offices break the law just for fun. And they call this a free country. What a joke. As a result of a 10:30 P.M. email for a meeting the next day at 10:30 A.M. at Santee High School also run by Mayor Villaraigosa, King Tony, two of us went and the principal put up a power point on the budget of the school. I put the principal and a representive of the mayors group PLAS to a test. They could not answer what the revenue/students was, what the revenue/student of LAUSD is or what their companion school also under the control of PLAS is. The answers are: Santee revenue/student-$3475, LAUSD-about $11,000 and Roosevelt $9,000/student. Even though Roosevelt has $9,000/student from LAUSD and they pay for the building maintainence and special ed on top the budget for one of their 7 academies, small schools, was $4,400. Where did the other $4,600 go? How does one high school run by the same people have $5,600 more than the other school? And how is it at Roosevelt even with this funding they are wiping out all extra classes? At Santee High School in one year teachers have gone from 88 FTE to projected 50. Are these accountable nice people? Are you kidding. Now as a result of busting PLAS’s reps being no nothings they have no more credibility. We are going to start training the parents and they already have another meeting scheduled for next Monday and have been invited to come again and we will be there. Someone has to help these concerned parents.
All commercial news is tabloid news. Journalism is dead. Again the same game is played and “journalists” are not bright enough to see it
In a previous post, Diane cited an article by Tim Steller in Arizona on the BASIS-Tuscon school, which places high in the rankings.
Here is the core of what Tim Steller wrote about BASIS-Tuscon (and it is the central component of all the high school rankings):
“the Basis schools require students to take eight AP courses before graduation, take six AP tests and pass at least one…That naturally helps Basis place high in the U.S. News rankings”
And, it is ALL about the rankings. And the College Board’s Advanced Placement program.
Steller adds this important point in his article about BASIS, made by an education consultant:
“AP has pulled the wool over people’s eyes across the nation…”
Actually, it’s the College Board that has “pulled the wool over people’s eyes.” About AP, to be sure. But also about the SAT and PSAT, and Accuplacer, the placement test used by more than 60 percent of community colleges. They’re all mostly worthless, more hype than reality.
Consider the Advanced Placement program, pushed shamelessly buy the College Board, and by Jay Mathews at The Washington Post (Mathews started the Challenge Index, a ranking of high schools based on the number of AP tests they give).
A 2002 National Research Council study of AP courses and tests found them to be a “mile wide and an inch deep” and inconsistent with research-based principles of learning.
A 2004 study by Geiser and Santelices found that “the best predictor of both first- and second-year college grades” is unweighted high school grade point average, and a high school grade point average “weighted with a full bonus point for AP…is invariably the worst predictor of college performance.”
A 2005 study (Klopfenstein and Thomas) found AP students “…generally no more likely than non-AP students to return to school for a second year or to have higher first semester grades.” Moreover, the authors wrote that “close inspection of the [College Board] studies cited reveals that the existing evidence regarding the benefits of AP experience is questionable,” and “AP courses are not a necessary component of a rigorous curriculum.”
A 2006 MIT faculty report noted ““there is ‘a growing body of research’ that students who earn top AP scores and place out of institute introductory courses end up having ‘difficulty’ when taking the next course.” Two years prior, Harvard “conducted a study that found students who are allowed to skip introductory courses because they have passed a supposedly equivalent AP course do worse in subsequent courses than students who took the introductory courses at Harvard” (Seebach, 2004). Dartmouth found that high scores on AP psychology tests do NOT translate into college readiness for the next-level course. Indeed, students admit that ““You’re not trying to get educated; you’re trying to look good;” and, “”The focus is on the test and not necessarily on the fundamental knowledge of the material.” Students know that AP is far more about gaming the college acceptance process than it is learning.
In The ToolBox Revisited (2006), Adelman wrote about those who had misstated his original ToolBox (1999) work: “With the exception of Klopfenstein and Thomas (2005), a spate of recent reports and commentaries on the Advanced Placement program claim that the original ToolBox demonstrated the unique power of AP course work in explaining bachelor’s degree completion. To put it gently, this is a misreading.”
Ademan goes on to say that “Advanced Placement has almost no bearing on entering postsecondary education,” and when examining and statistically quantifying the factors that relate to bachelor’s degree completion, Advanced Placement does NOT “reach the threshold level of significance.”
The 2010 book “AP: A Critical Examination” noted that “Students see AP courses on their transcripts as the ticket ensuring entry into the college of their choice,” yet, “there is a shortage of evidence about the efficacy, cost, and value of these programs.” And this: AP has become “the juggernaut of American high school education,” but “ the research evidence on its value is minimal.”
As Geiser (2007) notes, “systematic differences in student motivation, academic preparation, family background and high-school quality account for much of the observed difference in college outcomes between AP and non-AP students.” College Board-funded studies do not control well for these student characteristics (even the College Board concedes that “interest and motivation” are keys to “success in any course”). Klopfenstein and Thomas (2010) find that when these demographic characteristics are controlled for, the claims made for AP disappear.
Yet, the myths –– especially about AP, the SAT and PSAT –– endure. Meanwhile, the College Board is promoting the Common Core and says it has “aligned” (cough, wink) its products with it. And people believe it.
Stopping corporate-style “reform and the Common Core is easier said than done. Parents, students and educators are going to have to remove the wool from over their eyes.
And that means abandoning blind belief in the College Board and the products it peddles.
There is no doubt we have sociopaths running most major school districts right now. After all, here in Chicago it’s Rahm Emanuel. Even his supporters are realizing that he’s “crazy as a road lizard…” (to quote our friend, Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis).
One of the earlier comments notes that schools can “up” their rankings just by offering AP courses — even if no child “passes” an AP exam. This trick is as old as “Stand and Deliver” (remember that falsification of reality that caught so many teachers’ fancy a quarter century ago?) and “The Marva Collins Story…” In each case, material reality ceases to exist and all you need are desires. Hence, for the past quarter century, the growing group of (many for profit) hucksters who are selling their approach to that gospel of “All children can learn…” (As if we didn’t know this going back to the days when Plato was hanging out with his buddies…). But just to remind us how crazy things can get, Chicago last summer created the position of “Chief Officer for Innovation and Incubation” and hired a guy from one of the consulting outfits at a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year to help us incubate some of that “all children can learn” stuff. (For details, check out “Todd Babbitz”, who is operating Chicago’s incubator while the public schools claim we’re facing a “deficit” of a billion dollars new year, more or less).
Ironically, we first caught up with this “Anyone can do AP…” nonsense back in the 1980s and ended it, at least until the Newsweek nonsense erupted the last ten years or so.
Around the time of “Stand and Deliver”, Chicago public schools decided to expand the “Advanced Placement” course offerings in the general high schools of the city. That’s the majority of high schools, the ones who get the kids who are selected by the magnets.
Within about two years, we had twice as many courses called “Advanced Placement” than we had two years earlier and CPS officials began hyping that advance, without allowing anyone to ask whether any of the kids in those classes were “passing” the AP exams. Plus, for a couple of years, there was a bounty on kids who were taking “AP” classes in Chicago. Your school got $50 or $100 more per year for each kid in “AP.”
I didn’t know about Campbell’s law then, but it works the other way too. Incentives breed a rash of the incented. The number of kids in AP classes continued to explode until some of us (sigh, this has always gotten boring at some point) pointed out, after having had to fight for the basic information) that while the number of kids in “AP” classes and the number of “AP” classes had exploded, the number actually taking the exams and passing was the same as before the explosion.
Nowadays, if silly marketing tricks are necessary to lure families to make the “choice” for a particular school (and we’re swamped in the sludge of “choiciness” here in Chicago…), then what cheaper and better way than to require every kid to take a bunch of “AP” classes, no matter whether they want to or know enough to face the actual curriculum or not.
My eldest son, who also did well in baseball at Whitney Young Magnet High School in Chicago, is now doing well in the computer industry in the Bay Area in California, after four years at Berkeley. The Advance Placement classes he took at Whitney Young were very helpful, and challenging, so it worked, with or without the “credit” upon arrival in college. From economics to U.S. History, from statistics to calculus, they were challenging years with good teachers and that’s as it’s supposed to be. But not for every child, and not to goose up some silly ranking so that the next time someone goes to the schools website the music is from some old Jaime Esclante fictionalization…
Have a nice day. I’m going to cover today’s Chicago protest. If you aren’t tune in, every day here we’re having more and more protests around town, and these weeks are only the beginning. Yesterday, Chicago Public Schools officials almost tried to arrest preachers doing a “Pray In” against the school closings. Two weeks ago, the kids had a “Play In” in the lobby of CPS headquarters, and the security chief banned the bubbles (someone might slip). There are student walkouts just about every day. Tomorrow we re-elect CORE and Karen Lewis by a wide margin (we’ll report it as early as possible at substancenews.net) and then on Saturday, Chicago begins the three-day “Long March” across the city against the closings, which will be voted on at next Wednesday’s Board meeting.
So maybe it’s not a bad thing to have a raging sociopath running your city. It brings everyone else together in the fellow ship of protest, from “Play In” and “Pray In” to student walkouts and civil rights marches of miles and miles…
Our local online news proudly featured this ranking. When I disputed the validity, I was attacked personally by people I have never met. Here is a linkhttp://murrieta.patch.com/groups/schools/p/u-s-news-ranks-murrieta-high-schools-among-the-best