Four Steps to High School Greatness

Newsweek is publishing this week its latest list of "America's Best High Schools," based on a much-maligned ranking system I invented a decade ago. I think it is the most useful quantitative measure of a high school. But I went to the office Sunday for a frantic clean-up of my e-mail basket so there would be room for the blizzard of messages I get every time Newsweek puts out a new list.

The questions are often the same: Why I am such an idiot? And how have I managed to involve such a fine publication as Newsweek in my outrageous scheme to confuse readers and label schools?

The list, which I call the Challenge Index, ranks public schools based on student participation in college-level tests. I did it the first time to draw attention to a book I wrote in 1998, "Class Struggle." The book argued that what we thought were our best public high schools had some unacknowledged flaws. I was particularly dismayed by the way most people perceived two very different high schools where I had spent a great deal of time.

The first school was Garfield High School in a low-income neighborhood of East Los Angeles. From 1982 to 1987 I hung around its huge campus, trying to figure out how a group of dedicated teachers, led by the soon-to-be famous math teacher Jaime Escalante, had been able to offer Advanced Placement (AP) classes to all students who wanted to take them and to successfully prepare the children of day laborers and seamstresses for college.

The second school was Mamaroneck High School in Westchester County, a very affluent New York City suburb. From 1994 to 1997 I frequently visited its lively, elongated campus, immersing myself in the dynamics of a well-regarded suburban school.

The vast majority of Mamaroneck students had parents with college degrees and well-paid jobs, and by and large were better prepared for AP than the Garfield students had been. Yet Mamaroneck's AP course policy was the opposite of Garfield's open door. Mamaroneck students were not allowed to take AP courses if their grades the previous year in that subject had not been good.

Garfield treated AP as a tool to energize the curriculum and give average students a taste of long reading lists and three-hour exams so that they would be better prepared to survive the rigors of college. (Two recent studies have shown that students with good grades on AP tests are more likely to graduate from college.) Mamaroneck High, on the other hand, treated AP as a reward for students who had gotten good grades in previous classes and wanted something that would look good on their transcripts. (One Mamaroneck C-student was so enraged by the refusal to let her take AP U.S. history that she studied on her own for a year and passed the AP test anyway.)

What frustrated me was that when I asked people in Los Angeles about Garfield, they would tell me it was a bad school. They would say: Look at all those poor Mexican kids they have to deal with! When I asked people in Westchester County about Mamaroneck, they would say it was a good school, full of kids from nice families.

What I had seen had convinced me it was not that simple, so I devised the Challenge Index to show that Garfield had some strengths that deserved praise, and that Mamaroneck could be more challenging a school if it let more students take its best courses.

Given all of its advantages, Mamaroneck was certain to do better than most schools on my list, even though it was playing my game with one hand tied behind its back. And so there it is this week in Newsweek list, number 185 on the list, with an average of 2.525 AP tests for every graduating senior. Not bad.

Garfield could not be expected to do that well. Its student body is 77.5 percent low-income students, compared to only 4 percent at Mamaroneck. But this week Garfield also made the Newsweek list, at number 1,081 with an average of 1.0455 AP tests per graduating senior. On any of the most popular measures of high schools, such as average test scores, Garfield is going to be near the bottom, because those scores closely reflect the percentage of low-income students. But on the Newsweek list, Garfield, like Mamaroneck, is among the top 5 percent of all U.S. public schools in AP or IB test participation. Also not bad.

Thinking about these two schools over the years, I have identified four powerful ways of teaching that were more common at Garfield than at Mamaroneck when I was visiting them. I think they explain how Garfield became so much better than its reputation, and how Mamaroneck might do even better than it has done if it took those four lessons to heart: