Help Find the Super High Schools

The Newsweek editors and I decided to put some of these schools on the Challenge Index list because they did not appear to violate our rule of admitting no more than half of their students based on competitive grades and test scores. Yet this turned out to be, at least to my mind, a very subjective standard, and I have been looking for a clearer and fairer way to decide which schools have too few average students.

Here is my latest idea, for which I also need your help. I cringe at the idea of rating high schools by their average SAT and ACT scores. Those test results correlate closely with family income, and measure not how good the school is but how good the students are because they have affluent families that have exposed them to books and conversation and the arts and other academic advantages. But in deciding which magnet schools to allow on the Challenge Index list, I think SAT and ACT averages might be useful.

Any public high school that has no more than half of its students selected by grades and test scores and has at least as many AP or IB tests as it has graduating seniors is placed the Newsweek list of the nation's most challenging schools. Those schools, I think, have enough average students to merit inclusion. But some of them, I have discovered, are in such affluent areas that their average SAT or ACT scores are higher than those of some of the magnet schools I have kept off the list for being too selective.

Thomas Jefferson is the only public high school I have kept off The Washington Post's local Challenge Index list, and I don't think there is a school in the country, magnet or not, that matches its intimidating average SAT score of 1480. But another magnet school, Banneker in the District, I put on the list because its average SAT score was only 1076, lower than the SAT averages of several non-magnet schools in the Washington suburbs. Lowell in San Francisco, whose alumni have been among the most persistent in questioning its absence from the list, was reported to have an SAT average of 1236 in one Internet posting. That is very good, but below that of at least a few non-magnet schools on the list.

The new rule I am thinking of proposing to my editors at Newsweek is to add to the list any previously excluded magnet schools whose average SAT or ACT scores are no higher than the highest SAT or ACT average for any non-magnet public school in the country. The ACT said its highest average for a non-magnet school with significant numbers of ACT test takers is 26.8 out of 36 points, the rough equivalent of 1200 out of 1600 on the SAT in 2005, the last year before the SAT switched to its new three part test with a top score of 2400.

Getting the top non-magnet school average for the SAT, however, is not going to be so easy. The ACT people said they could honor their agreement not to share individual school data by not telling me which school had that 26.8 average. (I have since found a school, New Trier in Winnetka, Ill., which has that exact ACT average.) But the College Board, which owns the SAT, declined to tell me what their highest non-magnet school average was, much less name the school.

I have begun my own search for the highest regular school SAT in America. I invite you to join me. So far, the highest I have found is 1283, at Saratoga High School in Saratoga, Calif., Steven Spielberg's alma mater. I have visited this fine public school in the heart of Silicon Valley. It has many affluent and education-oriented families, and its high average is not entirely unexpected. The second highest average I have found so far is 1275 at Scarsdale High School in Westchester County, N.Y., where I once lived. It claims Aaron Sorkin, creator of "The West Wing" on NBC, among its famous graduates, and it is sort of like Saratoga, but with snow and lots of Yankee fans.

So far I haven't found many other normal enrollment high schools that come very close to those two. The highest non-magnet school average in the Washington area is 1267, at Whitman High School in Bethesda, part of the Montgomery County school system. Most of the other schools I have looked at around the country are in the low 1200s. (The ranks of the schools just mentioned on the national Challenge Index list are Whitman 108, Saratoga 204, Scarsdale 210 and New Trier 295.)

If you are a school guidance head with the numbers at your finger tips, or find an SAT or ACT report on your local high school's Web site, send any average scores for the class of 2005 that are at least 1250 on the SAT or 28 on the ACT to challenge@washpost.com. I will check out what you send me, and try to sort out the status of our nation's most selective public schools, and our highest SAT or ACT scorers, in a future column.