Peter Greene points out that U.S. News used to be a news magazine, but has turned itself into a ranking agency, mainly of colleges, then high schools, and now…wait for it…elementary and middle schools! Does it get any more ridiculous than that?
Its rankings are based mainly on test scores, which are guaranteed to favor schools that are the whitest and most affluent.
US News was once a magazine, but these days it’s arguably most famous as a Ranker of Things, especially schools. They rank colleges and high schools annually, and despite the fact that these rankings are hugely questionable (see here, here and here), they are uncritically reprinted, quoted, and used by the fortunate top tier as a marketing tool.
So I’m sure from their perspective it makes sense to extend the brand by ranking elementary and middle schools. This is just as bad an idea as you think it is, and raises some big questions.
How do they do it?
I first guessed a system that used darts, a blindfold, and the broad side of a barn. But no–it’s worse than that.Scoring was almost entirely rooted in students’ performance on mathematics and reading/language arts state assessments.So, standardized test scores from 2018-2019. But also demographics worked in by soaking the test results in a sophisticated stew of argle-bargle fertilizer, because US News employs data strategists instead of journalists….
As many Wags on Twitter (a fine band name) observed, we can look for US News to continue to expand its brand. First obvious choice is rankings for pre-schools, but why stop there? America needs to know–where are the top-ranked playgrounds in the country? Whose mini-van back seat is producing the leaders of tomorrow? Which were the top-ranked fetuses of the year, and which uteruses are the best? Top-ranked sperm?
My dream is that the world greets this latest rank adventure with a massive yawn, but they won’t. People love rankings, love them so much that too many don’t even pause to ask, “Rank based on what, exactly?” Nobody anywhere is going to benefit from the sophistication of their analysis; the best we can hope for is that schools do not follow the lead of colleges and some high schools and start trying to game the system (“Sorry, Mrs. Potts, but your child is going to bring down our ranking with their test scores, so we’re booting little Pat out of kindergarten.”)
Just stop, US News. Just stop.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you Peter Greene and Diane.
So many NEWS outlets are plain BAD. I have noticed that even the NEWS sources on TV promote stupid stuff filled with emotion. They can’t just report the news, but instead put an emotional twist with LIES.
That is, many “so-called” news sources also seem to deliberately promote LIES and misinformation.
Where is propaganda techniques taught in schools? Oh, forgot … understanding propaganda is something the LIARS do want our young to know.
Yvonne,
I agree. It’s urgent and vital. Media and information literacy should be part of the school curriculum…. robustly so starting in 6th grade through high school. Common Sense Media is a great resource for teachers.
Here are a few resources for educators in schools where this is not already happening:
https://www.medialit.org
https://www.commonsensemedia.org/news-and-media-literacy
https://medialiteracynow.org/resources-for-teachers/
https://pbslearningmedia.org/collection/newsandmedialiteracy/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/learning/lesson-plans/the-power-to-change-the- world-a-teaching-unit-on-student-activism-in-history-and-today.html
I had fun with this idiocy during my 19 years leading a school. At open houses I deadpanned, “We require ultrasound images and APGAR scores for pre-k application.” The wonderful thing was some Manhattan parents nodded and took notes.
All these rankings do is drive affluent, white parents into white neighborhoods. Test scores promote racial isolation. A school is a lot more than the sum of its test scores. Parents should be asking questions about the preparation of the teachers and support staff, the facilities of the school including school library, curricula and co-curricula offerings, the culture and safety of the school. These issues are far more important than test scores as they are more likely to contribute to a student’s overall adjustment and success.
Right. There’s a dark side to over-competing for top rankings in anything, sports, Wall St., politics. It’s not sustainable & a most corrupting thing. We’ve seen how college rankings led to the college cheating scandal. How soon will there be an elementary schools cheating scandal? For US NEWS winning $$$$ is the only game.
Steve Nelson, I LOLed at your PreK admittance joke. The fact that parents took notes shows US NEWS will gain market share.
Correct, retired teacher– pertinent data is the only thing that helps in making an informed choice. These rankings help only RE salespeople. Can you imagine a financial manager choosing investments via some ‘ranking’ that was a thinly-veiled sales pitch?
US News gave top scores to a high school to the south of me that was famous for: its affluent parents, 99% entry into four year colleges, and significant student suicide rate. Seems the pressure got to some of the kids. But hey, great SAT scores!
Thanks, Peter, and Ranker of Things enters my lexicon today.
Perfect, Ms. Watter!
And the school system goes to great lengths to hide that suicide rate. I live in a district like this….although I live in the “poorer” side of town. The parents are test score/grade crazy and the kids have mental health issues. The kids all take 3-4 AP classes ,they are all stellar athletes all while holding down a part time job and doing community service because it looks good on the college applications. It’s just crazy!
Rank the Rankers
Why not rank the rankers?
The US Newsy chancres
The Hawvids and the Yales
The font of fairy tales
Unveil them as they be
The Wizard, for a fee
Who hides behind a mask
For moneymaking task
I see that you avoided the rankers/wankers rhyme, which springs so readily to mind.
Another great piece, SomeDAM!
had to look up chancres… brilliant choice
Rankings for most meretricious
Tie for 1st place: US News, Harvard, Yale
Rankings for most money accepted from pedophile sex traffickers
Harvard
MIT
Rankings for most money accepted from the Koch Brothers
MIT
George Mason University
Florida State University
TAGO, SDP!!
Erratum
Make that a 4 way tie for most meretricious: MIT
Giving everything under the sun a ranking is an American disease. It’s ridiculous.
It is! And it’s completely idiotic. And almost inevitably, the person who is idiot enough to insist on the rankings is also idiot enough to do it based upon completely specious criteria. If you go onto Quora, for example, you will find THOUSANDS of entries by people asking things like
Is Jimmy Page (or Eric Clapton or whoever) the greatest guitarist who ever lived?
Now, of course, both Page and Clapton spent their entire lives playing songs with tonic, dominant, subdominant, relative minor chord progressions (stuff that you can teach to most any child in a couple months) and doodling over these using the same moronic, repetitive major and minor pentatonic scales (what passes in popular rock ‘n’ roll for “lead” guitar). In the classical and jazz guitar worlds, these are preschool stuff. Throw a stick at any classical or jazz guitar program, and you will hit a FAR, FAR more gifted guitarist. And we live in a world that produces the likes of Paco de Lucia and Joe Pass and Pat Metheny and Julian Bream. And we are currently living in the freaking golden age of the guitar (and of many other instruments) because the quality of musical instruction is now so high. But people will continue to do these dumb rankings.
Well, ranking schools based upon invalid standardized tests is as dumb as is placing Page or Clapton at the top of the list of the world’s greatest guitarists. First, it’s idiotic to bother to try to make such a list. Second, the criteria used are ridiculous. And third, the conclusions drawn are preposterous.
Here, a 14-year-old kid who is a FAR more accomplished guitarist than is either Page or Clapton is:
Now here is a guitarist:
“How do they do it?”
Perhaps it’s following the footsteps of past practice.
The “trouble is caused by what we don’t know” concept.
Rumor has it, the concept was started by a lady
called Eve. One day she pinged her mate called
Adam and quipped “You know this garden of Eden,
this terrestrial paradise, can’t be, what I think
it should be, ’cause we don’t know something.”
Well, now that “scores” are “known” to be a sham,
is it OK to stay wed to a score based avatar?
Is it OK to continue the complicity required
for the sham to continue?
Our Sun is pretty far down in the rankings for stars in the visible universe.
And we humans would probably rank our own intelligence way up there, but there are undoubtedly alien life forms as far above us as we are above the round worms on the IQ scale.
We like to rank things because it makes us feel important.
Homo ignorans
Homo SUPPOSEDLY Sapiens
I’ve read that recent studies suggest that Earth-like planets could have started forming abundantly in the universe as far back as ten billion years ago. Earth is only 4.5 billion years old. Life first appeared on Earth not long after, about 3.7 billion years ago. Intelligent life has yet to appear on Earth, if one doesn’t factor in crows.
Now, the physical laws elsewhere are the same as here, so it is highly likely that life has emerged on many other planets and that it did so and started evolving LONG before we did. Assuming that intelligent life doesn’t end up wrecking its planet and destroying itself (surely, marks of intelligence), then the universe is probably TEEMING with life that has evolved for BILLIONS OF YEARS longer than here. That doesn’t mean that it is necessarily intelligent life typically. Fruit flies have evolved for about 40 million years, but they don’t do the things we consider highly intelligent, such as writing symphonies and exterminating other members of their own species in genocidal wars.
Nonetheless, intelligence is a good survival strategy (one definition makes that a tautology: Intelligence is the conscious ability to change one’s behavior or environment in ways that are advantageous to survival). So, yeah, we are probably pretty low on the intelligence scale, galactically.
Which suggests two answers to the Fermi paradox (if there are aliens, where are they?): One, other intelligences nearby are so far beyond us that they simply don’t care to try to “contact” us. When was the last time you tried to establish communication with a colony of ants? Two (and this is my own), highly evolved intelligent entities, should they survive long enough, might well retreat into virtual worlds of their own making that are far more satisfying to them than the real one. Why try to head off across parsecs of inhospitable space to some rock elsewhere when you can immerse yourself in a Matrix of your own making? A taste of that might be too much to resist.
I find the recent talk of UFOs resulting from released Pentagon videos particularly humorous.
Do people really believe that aliens who are advanced enough to visit earth from some distant planet light years away are not going to possess the capability to remain completely invisible to our relatively backward radar and IR detectors?
Besides , Occam’s razor says the simplest explanation is the most likely: The Pentagon was simply running a simulation to see how their pilots would react. And by all indications, the pilots– and much of the public –swallowed the bait hook line and sinker.
love this reply
Fruit flies undoubtedly wonder why we are so dumb, despite our big brains.
The fruit flies and dung beetles around here are telling me that it’s getting lonely, what with the mass exodus to go the the East Coast of Flor-uh-duh to swarm around Trump and his spawn since they relocated there.
Rank Insecurity
We humans like to rank
Cuz ranking gives us class
Assurance that we’re swank
And far above the mass
I have to start writing shorter comments. I think that my book-length ones automatically go into moderation.
Thus we’ll take a spin in the rhyme machine
to ease the pain of our delusions.
“There is no greater joy
Than soaring high
On the wings
Of your dreams
Except maybe the joy of
Watching a dreamer
Who has nowhere to land
But in the ocean of reality”
Homo sic puppy us
Doing the Wrong Thing Righter
The proliferation of educational assessments, evaluations and canned programs belongs in the category of what systems theorist Russ Ackoff describes as “doing the wrong thing righter. The righter we do the wrong thing,” he explains, “the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.”
Our current neglect of instructional issues are the result of assessment policies that waste resources to do the wrong things, e.g., canned curriculum and standardized testing, right. Instructional central planning and student control doesn’t – can’t – work. But, that never stops people trying.
The result is that each effort to control the uncontrollable does further damage, provoking more efforts to get things in order. So the function of management/administration becomes control rather than creation of resources. When Peter Drucker lamented that so much of management consists in making it difficult for people to work, he meant it literally. Inherent in obsessive command and control is the assumption that human beings can’t be trusted on their own to do what’s needed. Hierarchy and tight supervision are required to tell them what to do. So, fear-driven, hierarchical organizations turn people into untrustworthy opportunists. Doing the right thing instructionally requires less centralized assessment, less emphasis on evaluation and less fussy interference, not more. The way to improve controls is to eliminate most and reduce all.
What’s worse is that “mainstream” media outlets lazily refer to these rankings to justify whatever argument they are taking about “failing schools.” This simply perpetuates confirmation bias.