Gary Rubinstein reports that U.S. News & World Report altered the way it measures “the best high schools,” and charters suffered. Many got top rankings in the past despite their high attrition rates and demographics towards whites and Asians. The new formula is harder to game.
Gary knows that the annual exercise in ranking the best high schools is inherently fraudulent. What matters most can’t be measured, and what is considered “best” usually means having students from affluent families. What is “best” for some students is not necessarily best for others. The best high school may be the ones where students feel welcomed, inspired, learn to love learning, and are encouraged to do their best and care for others.
What do you think “the best high school” is?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As a participant on high school accreditation teams, the high schools that impressed me the most were ones with engaged and energized faculties and progressive and caring administrators. It was all about the people. The best high school I ever saw from the inside was George Washington High School in San Francisco. They had wonderful administrators, faculty, and students (very diverse) in buildings that seemed to being held up by layers of paint! (What a dump!) Class were too full of students, but everyone cooperated and coped magnificently. Image what they could have done with solid buildings and sufficient funding to lower class sizes? (They only got their average class sizes down below 30 by including special ed class that had 2-6 students in them.)
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The “best high school”? Why my alma mater, of course! Malcolm Shabazz-City High School in Madison, Wisconsin.
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I thought my high school in Ithaca NY, was best. I had a fabulous English teacher (Elizabeth Whicher) who had met Robert Frost as a young girl.
What’s your high school’s claim to fame?
I demand to see your text scores! (Test scores too)
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Well, I regret that I have no test scores. I can’t speak for my fellow alums, but I was a pretty screwed-up kid, and my school helped me see the merits of staying out of trouble; it also taught me to love reading and learning.
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No text scores?
No rank for you!
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I tell ya, I’d like to strangle the programmer who coded the self correct on this thing.
It’s frightening that we trust programmers to drive our cars when they can’t even properly program what should only be a simple spell check
And I say that as someone who worked as a programmer and knows how dumb many of these people are. But then you don’t have to take my word for it. Just type in any simple English phrase in a comment box and watch it get changed to utter gibberish. The Babble translator.
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I think High Schools in general, need to change the climate….period. Get rid of AP and return to an environment that is inclusive for ALL students. As to the US News’ new formula? I still don’t agree with rating/ranking of schools, but what ever it is that they did, it sure knocked some schools/school systems for a loop! It was nice to not see the “usual” schools at the front of the line (and my school system usually has a few schools at the top). I’m sure we’ll be hearing from the many stink tanks how the new formula is just plain unfair….. BOO HOO!!!
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Next metric for this scheme, a bonus for the College Board in income from AP class prep and tests will be an economic success measure for graduates of each high school in some combination with measures of the economic benefits from the postsecondary programs they enter or jobs they secure.
I kid you not. The metrics are largely in place and being pushed by the BMGF.
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My school system is an AP for ALL in HS. The kids who don’t take AP sit and rot with 30+ kids in the classroom doing nothing with teachers who choose not to teach (that is the saddest part). The fact is that the AP classes are nothing BUT test prep for the AP test. There is no learning or hands on. AP chemistry has NO chemicals and NO lab experiments….the kids go into the lab, but do labs on a computer. There are NO dissections in AP Biology….all on a computer. The AP ELA teachers use content directly (word for word and un-cited) from Shmoops and SparkNotes. The AP maths are so strange that well educated engineers can’t understand. How is this good for kids? When will the College Board be exposed for the racist fraud that it is? It seems like every time that it goes up in flames, a stronger Phoenix rises from the flames and ash.
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“AP chemistry has NO chemicals and NO lab experiments….the kids go into the lab, but do labs on a computer.”
How effin insane is that? Ay ay ay ay ay.
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LisaM
It is indeed insane to have AP science courses with no lab. They are certainly not equivalent to freshman college science courses, which invariably include lab work.
Its kind of ironic that high school science courses were actually better in many schools before AP came along.
When I took high school chem, biology and physics, each included labs.
You simply cannot get a real feel for and understanding of science without doing labs.
And computer chemistry experiments? Really? What a joke.
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AP has changed everything. It is a form of segregation.
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If the goal is to have high schools provide appropriate education for all students, there will need to be some advanced classes that are inappropriate for some students.
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“AP has changed everything.”
AP is horse manure. Actually AP didn’t change a thing. It’s the stupid, yes stupid and not ignorant* adminimals who have mandated AP classes that are to blame.
*Ignorant implies innocent not knowing. Stupidity implies willing disregard of facts.
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The mere fact that the ranking methodology can have such a profound impact on ranking means the whole thing is simply a ridiculous joke
When you change the methodology and the results change significantly (as they do with stuff like VAM, for example), it’s a big red flashing warning.
US News has been selling their crap and getting away with it for far too long.
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Friedrich Hayek (who is oft rightly criticized , along with Milton Friedman,for his no holds barredfree market stance) nonetheless had some very astute things to say in his faux Nobel speech
In fact, he identified the crux of the problem with economists and other social scientists weighing in on everything from economics to education
“This brings me to the crucial issue. Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones. While in the physical sciences it is generally assumed, probably with good reason, that any important factor which determines the observed events will itself be directly observable and measurable, in the study of such complex phenomena as the market, which depend on the actions of many individuals, all the circumstances which will determine the outcome of a process, for reasons which I shall explain later, will hardly ever be fully known or measurable. And while in the physical sciences the investigator will be able to measure what, on the basis of a prima facie theory, he thinks important, in the social sciences often that is treated as important which happens to be accessible to measurement. This is sometimes carried to the point where it is demanded that our theories must be formulated in such terms that they refer only to measurable magnitudes.
It can hardly be denied that such a demand quite arbitrarily limits the facts which are to be admitted as possible causes of the events which occur in the real world. This view, which is often quite naively accepted as required by scientific procedure, has some rather paradoxical consequences. We know: of course, with regard to the market and similar social structures, a great many facts which we cannot measure and on which indeed we have only some very imprecise and general information. And because the effects of these facts in any particular instance cannot be confirmed by quantitative evidence, they are simply disregarded by those sworn to admit only what they regard as scientific evidence: they thereupon happily proceed on the fiction that the factors which they can measure are the only ones that are relevant.”
/// End quote
In other words, economists pick out only those factors that lend themselves to quantification (test scores in the case of education) and basically pretend that those are the only factors that matter.
This leads to what Hayek (and lots of people who have commented here) recognize as utterly ridiculous conclusions (eg, about student “growth”, teacher “value” VAM, school performance (ranking by US News) and all the rest).
The approach taken by economists is really just stupid on its face, but lots of policymakers and school administrators nonetheless treat it as if it were “scientific” and worthy of being taken seriously
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Excellent citing of the Hayak quote. Seems to verify one of your poems:
Whatever is measured counts
Whatever counts is measured
And counting whatever measures
Is measuring whatever counts
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Duane
I recently discovered the speech Hayek gave at the awards ceremony for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (which is not really a Nobel Prize, by the way
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-economics-nobel-isnt-really-a-nobel/
https://www.alternet.org/2012/10/there-no-nobel-prize-economics/
Its actually ironic because Hayeks career was not really going anywhere before he was given the award, which immediately boosted his credibility among academics and policymakers.
And Hayek was all too keen to exploit this newfound stardom.
So, Hayek did not practice what he preached, but his observations were nonetheless right on the money.
And boosting the credibility of economics and of economists (lending it an air of scientific legitimacy that it did not deserve) was the whole purpose of the “Nobel Memorial Prize” so they certainly succeeded.
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And it was actually a particular brand of “free market” economics pushed by people like Hayek and Milton Friedman that the Swedish central bank was trying to get legitimacy for with their fake Nobel
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William Black calls the econ award a “near beer” variant of the Nobel Prize.
Ha ha ha!
Economics could be a science if more economists were scientists
https://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/10/economics-science-economists-scientists.html
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There are many schools doing great work that are not highly ranked on this revised list. They serve diverse communities and their children well. Their teachers are enthusiastic, innovative and caring, and many of the students go on to higher education. Those that make the top of any list are generally selective schools, and it is relatively easy to get great results with the best and brightest. That said, it was good to see several New York City magnet schools near the top of the list. New York City provides far more options for students than any one size fits all charter school. It is about time New York City gets some attention for doing something well.
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The best high school depends on the student. For some, Thomas Jefferson or Stuyvesant would be best. For others, these would be terrible schools.
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yes yes yes
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“While KIPP’s cheating scheme was truly dishonest, other charter schools gamed the ranking system another way. Before this year, the ranking was based primarily on the percent of seniors to pass an AP exam. So if you were a charter school with high attrition and had 25 seniors in your graduating class, despite the fact that you had 150 ninth graders three years earlier, if all 25 of those seniors passed at least one AP test, you could be one of top rated schools in the country.”
Lordy. What a garbage ranking system. I think the question should be why anyone would take them seriously after that. This is Arne Duncan level analysis. “100%!” and then never ask “of what?”
I also have a question about “scaleability” and “secret sauce”. If the big “prestige” charter chains are so miraculous, why aren’t they consistent? Shouldn’t all KIPP schools be super-duper? That’s the grounding of the entire movement- that the only thing that matters is the school. If that’s true it should be consistent across schools at least in one chain. Public schools never claimed the only thing that matters was the school so they don’t have to meet this burden, and public schools aren’t national anyway, so they couldn’t, but charter chains do.
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Your point is BRILLIANTLY made, Chiara!
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Flawed metrics are a byproduct of so-called reform. They have a need to rate and rank everything, even if it provides misinformation.
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It all stems from the economist’s effort to rank and otherwise attach a number (which they equate with value) to everything.
Because most important factors (in this case what makes a “good” high school) actually can’t be quantified, it means the economist does the ranking/valuing based on a very narrow set of criteria (eg, SAT and AP scores, number of students taking AP, etc) which may in fact, have little or no relevance to the actual question (is this a good high school?)
When it comes right down to it, the whole exercise is just ridiculous because what are considered the best high schools all depends on which factors you choose to emphasize, which is essentially a subjective call. The people doing the ranking love to call their methods scientific and “objective” because they base them on numbers like test scores, but it does not matter, because the very act of selecting which factor(s) are important is completely subjective.
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perhaps this could even be worded: “especially since they can confuse and distract with misinformation”
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Ciedie
Yes
And one might also say with a large degree of confidence that flawed metrics are not a “byproduct” of reform, but actually the primary (intended) product.
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If there’s variance across “elite” charter chains, isn’t that proof that there other facts than the school?
Or do we just conveniently slot the variance into “other factors” but only when it benefits the operating theory of ed reform, which is that success is consistent and scaleable and a function of the miraculous charter “secret sauce”. The secret sauce has to work across schools and states or it’s not secret sauce. It’s variation due to other factors.
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We actually have a tiny rural district that does this. For some unknown reason a lot of kids with problems or kids who don’t do well on tests just “don’t fit” at that school and end up at other schools, schools that are less lauded as super schools.
‘Tis a mystery! Really it’s not and everyone knows it, but thankfully no one claims it’s “secret sauce” and exports it to all 50 states. What it is is gaming. And unfair to the schools that aren’t doing it.
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My son was one of those kids that didn’t fit (ADHD/severe executive functioning deficits/anxiety and depression), wasn’t provided appropriate accommodations, became depressed, ended up in a mental health facility and upon release from that he had such severe school avoidance he refused to go to school at all. Their solution was for us to take away all his electronics and lock them up at school so he would see them as the bad guys instead of us. Always trying to change the kid but never taking any accountability for changing the environment.
The school basically failed him. (I won’t bore you with anymore details)
Now, senior year he is at home with a tutor from the school. I believe he is being denied FAPE as well as violating IDEA (which I told the superintendent as much), because he had been taking advanced classes when he was able to attend school. Apparently when you receive in home instruction they can only provide the minimum. So basically they are just pushing him through so their graduation statistics don’t suffer. And our high school made that stupid US News list many times. I laugh every time I see it.
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A fish rots from the head, they say. And it’s just as true that if the head is sound, the rest is likely to be. I’ve been in schools that operated under truly stupid, draconian federal, state, and district mandates and seen those schools nonetheless function well because there was, in each, at the head, an administrator who genuinely liked other people and cared about kids and teachers. Ed Deformers don’t understand how important these intangibles are, ofc, even though the Prime Directive of a school is (or should be) to produce intrinsically motivated, life-long learners, each of whom sees a unique path, going forward, on which he or she can, with luck, flourish. A great administrator understands that kids aren’t standard or standardizable and that it takes real work to show the individual kid, given his or her interests and proclivities and abilities, a positive way forward. Such an administrator also does what he or she can to accomplish that goal DESPITE operating under the current Ed Deform occupation of our K-12 schools.
We now KNOW that school grading doesn’t bring about improvement and is indistinguishable from grading by median parental income. How long does it take before policy catches up to what is known?
This US obsession with who and what is “best” is moronic. Which was the better guitarist, Paco de Lucia or Andres Segovia? Well, they played in completely different styles, following completely different conventions. Comparing them is like comparing this set of shoelaces to that apple or that theory of personal identity in metaphysics. Stupid. US News and World Report and other organizations that do this “grading” should desist or be frank about the fact that they are ranking schools by parental wealth and income.
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Bob
Despite the fact that it is obvious (from the drastic changes in ranking from one method to the next), US News will NEVER acknowledge that their ranking systems are ALL junk because that would mean they would lose a lot of money.
They won’t because they get paid to ignore the obvious truth.
So they pretend that any problems with the system are simply efforts to “game” the system, with the implication that the problems can be easily fixed.
The ones really gaming the system are the people at US News who are gaming it for profit.
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These rankings sell magazines. The best of this, the best of that. Many a popular trashy magazine has such a blurb on the cover. Cosmopolitan, US News and World Report–only the subject of the “best” list differs from one mag to the other.
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Bob: Mark Twain, as usual nailed it in Jumping Frog of Calaverous County. Americans will compete over anything. A more competitive culture has never existed. So USNews sells rankings. Why would they not? Coke sells sweets.
What makes a culture great often ruins it. Rome defended itself with its military prowess until it produced an unmanageable empire that destroyed the Roman Republic. Will the obsession with competition be the death knell of the American Experiment?
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Competition does not make us great. It makes us purveyors of junk. The truly great things we have done as a society (beating the fascists in WWIi, putting a man on the moon, exploring the solar system with unmanned spacecraft, getting voting rights for African Americans, etc) were done cooperatively not competitively.
Ralph Nader understands this
Society Is In Decay–When the Worst Is First and the Best Is Last
If you want to see where a country’s priorities lie, look at how it allocates its money
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/05/30/society-decay-when-worst-first-and-best-last
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Advances in medicine and science also came out of cooperation, not competition.
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The general principle that cooperation is preferable to competition is true on a much broader scale, as well: the very survival of our species depends on it.
Pale Blue Dot (hat tip to Carl Sagan)
The Earth is where we make our stand
Against each other, or hand in hand
This pale blue dot is all we know
There ain’t another place to go
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It’s moronic, this obsession. It’s not surprising at all that Donald Trump owned a “beauty pageant,” the purpose of which is to line women up like horses at an auction and rank them. This kind of thing appeals to people of low cognitive ability.
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“Will the obsession with competition be the death knell of the American Experiment?”
No!
But our obsession (originally mis-typed as abscess) with everything military, everything death and destruction, like the Roman Republic you mentioned, will be the death knell of the American Experiment.
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Ed Deformers love measurement but a) have very low standards for what constitutes a valid measurement and b) breathtaking gullibility with regard to what is measurable c) utter blindness to the unintended consequences of the rules of the game that they establish, and d) an inability to make distinctions between situations to which a given measurement applies. These are the central ironies of “data-driven” Ed Deform. As long as we continue to grade fish on their tree-climbing ability, people on whether they have Anglo-Saxon names, we are going to be perpetuating travesties.
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Well stated. That’s why deform keeps churning out fake news. When you scratch the surface, you see they make false assumptions, omitted many students or used “funny” math.
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The irony of all this numerology on the part of the “data-driven” would be quite funny if it weren’t so tragic.
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The deformers are numerologically driven.
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Correction:
“Ed Deformers love PSEUDO-measurement but. . . “
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Exactly, Duane. Measuring things serves their purposes. It’s not even intended to be accurate, except very, very, very roughly. It’s mostly an instrument of power, something that they do and want to do because they can. People like them think like Henry Kissinger, who said one of the sickest things ever uttered by a human being: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
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“VAM is the ultimate mathrodisiac” — Arne Duncan
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The deformers are pseudophiles
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Pseudophile is defined in the urban dictionary as one who is attracted to fake things, which seems pretty apt, given deformers love of fake measurements(SGP and VAM), fake teachers(TfA), fake standards (CC), fake (online) schools, Fake Superintendents, fake graduate schools and fake Secretaries of Ed (Betsy and Arne) — and came research to support all the rest of their Fake stuff
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Fake research
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The Pseudophiles of Education
The Pseudophiles of ed
Love everything that’s fake
They love what Chetty said
The Chetty pie he baked
They love the SGPs
And love the teacher VAMs
They love the brooms of Rhees
And love the charter scams
They love the techy ties
The techy teacher bots
They love the “personal” lies
And love ’em lots and lots!
They love the pseudo schools
And love the pseudo science
They take us all for fools
With pseudo ed reliance
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These people are not simply blind or gullible (although the rest of us may be)
They KNOW they are up to no good.
That makes it much worse than a mistake.
It makes it fraud.
A good example is VAM, which many people continued to push despite having had the “issues” pointed out time and again.
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Yes. A VERY IMPORTANT POINT, SomeDAM. The testing companies are, indeed, perpetrating a fraud, and they know quite well that they are doing so. I dream of a group of statisticians and forward-thinking politicians getting together to hold these people accountable and force them to pay reparations.
I worked for many decades in educational publishing at a time when every state had its own “standards.” And interestingly, as if by magic, EVERY textbook program EVER published by ANY of these companies PERFECTLY correlated with the standards of EVERY state. That’s because every company had people in the marketing department whose business it was to make crap up. The marketing department would hire some folks to hack together a 50-page standards correlation, full of lists of standards and long strings of numbers set in 7-point type for each standard, showing where each standard was supposedly “covered,” and, if it was a textbook program with a large market, they would pay a consulting fee to a couple of EduPundits to put their names on a document containing the correlation–often the same ones who were listed as “authors” of the program, even though they contributed little or no actual text that they had written to the work. And a quarter to half of what was in any of those documents was complete bs because no one was going actually to check that stuff beyond simply noting that the correlation existed. Then they would take the exact same book and change the cover so that it said Texas edition or Florida edition and a few pictures inside to show longhorns and the Dallas Cowboys or gators and Gators.
But at least, given that that is how the publishers worked, they would, in those days, try to put together a coherent program, knowing that they were going to fudge the correlations to make every program everything to everyone. Now that almost all states are using the inane, puerile Gates/Coleman/Pimentel/Zimba bullet list, the publishers simply start with that and make it the default, de facto curriculum map for the program, and any attempt at coherence in the program is out the window. In other words, the standards have BECOME the curriculum, and the test question types have BECOME the content.
The problem of the standards having become the curriculum is not as severe in math as in ELA because in math Coleman and Zimba simply picked up the previously existing NCTM standards and tweaked them a bit (though much to their detriment). So at least math teachers had something to do with the standards they started with. In ELA, they assembled a hodge-podge from the mind-bogglingly stupid educational groupthink of a bunch of previously existing state ELA standards and sprinkled in requirements for higher Lexile readability levels for texts at each grade level and a nod to Coleman’s idiotic approach to literature, which I call New Criticism for Dummies. The consequences, for ELA, have been severe. To a significant extent , we’ve not been teaching English in K-12 schools since the Common [sic] Core [sic] went live in 2010. In most schools and in most ELA programs, text-based and online, “English” is now thinly disguised test prep all the time–students reading random snippets of text and “applying” “skills” from the bullet list to them. I call this the Monty Python “And Now for Something Completely Different” approach to ELA instruction. Millions of kids have been robbed of the experience of humane studies in reading, writing, literature, language, rhetoric, speaking, listening, discussion, debate, journalism, media, and thinking.
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When I briefly taught 3rd grade, a big part of my curriculum involved helping students distinguish fact from opinion. Fact versus opinion is something one is supposed to learn in elementary school. It’s ironic, ranking schools. Dumb! The word ‘best’ is a signal word denoting qualitative opinion, not quantitative fact. Apparently, US News and World is intended for second graders. — The best high school is the one with great qualities, like, you know, the one that’s totally awesome because it’s so cool.
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US News is written for people who want to be spoon fed.
It’s owned and operated by billionaire Mortimer Zukerman who puts his spin on everything.
He went to the same business school as Trump, although I don’t think he and Trump are pals.
He backed Texas governor Rick Perry for President, which is undoubtedly all anyone needs to know about him.
But if you want to know more there’s this
https://www.superyachtfan.com/yacht-lazy-z.html
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The best school is the one that takes you where you are and moves you in the direction you should go. As someone pointed out above, some may think one school is better and others may think another. This is why school choice people think having wide choices is good. In this they are correct. But there is another unfortunate aspect of the matter.
The best school for the community is the one which serves the community. While it is true that we teach stuff to children as our first job, it is equally true that we provide a cohesiveness to a community that brings it together in ways other community organizations cannot.
The tension between these two aspects of what schools are makes it hard to be either, but we must try. In the attempt to make school a place for the community to come together over its youth, we help foster a forward-looking community that examines itself and tries to create its better image of its future.
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well said, Roy.
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The problem with the idea that “best school for one is not the best for another” is that it encourages schools to cater to certain types and exclude others.
Schools like Stuyvesant are perfect examples of this.
Is it necessarily “best” for students to attend a school where they interact with few African American and Mexican American students because the school has an admission policy that effectively weeds out the latter?
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I agree. That is indeed the problem, and that is the tension to which I refer. Some of us feel that school is better if we create classes where students must commit to mountains of reading or reams of math problems rendered separate the wheat from the chaff. Nursing schools I know are almost obsessed with washing out a group of the students they are trying to train to be nurses. Coaches, concerned with creating what they see to be a winning team, create ways to eliminate not only inferior athletes but those whose attitudes hurt team cohesiveness. Both these examples are intent on the idea that what they are doing leads to the best result.
But I always ask the other question: are their methods functioning in the long term? Successful coaches, for example, are bound by their methods to produce instant winners. Often the methods produce side effects that are somewhere between incompatible with academics and downright immoral. Long term success in school requires a very messy democracy.
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“The best school is the one that takes you where you are and moves you in the direction you should go.”
I would not place that burden on the schools. WHAT?
“The best school is the one that ACKNOWLEDGES you where you are and ALLOWS YOU TO move youRSELF in the direction you DESIRE TO go.”
(throroughly agree with the rest of your comment, Roy)
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Well said, Roy!
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“. . PRIVATE charter schools tank.”
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