By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 2, 2006 10:25 AM

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:

1. Have high expectations for all students.

Jaime Escalante did not think Hispanic students were too ill-prepared or fragile to handle AP. He had taught nothing but Hispanic students, many of them poor, in his native Bolivia before he moved to the United States. He thought their only problem, like most teenagers, was that they were lazy. At Mamaroneck, there were many teachers who shared Escalante's view, but Mamaroneck's official policy was much more in tune with the thinking of most American high schools. Most U.S. educators still believe that letting students with bad work habits or disadvantaged backgrounds take difficult courses is setting them up for failure, and they are better off in an easier classes.

2. Give students more time to learn.

Escalante's cure for laziness was to steal time from students' days for more homework. He insisted that students struggling in his classes see him after school and put in two or three hours of extra work. These makeshift homework clubs became such popular gathering places that students' lives were transformed. Mamaroneck did not have to encourage homework in this way because the school had mostly middle-class students with parents who usually made sure their children were prepared for class. The Garfield method has spread to some of the most successful inner city schools. The Southeast campus of the YES College Preparatory schools of Houston is number 87 on the Newsweek list this week, despite that fact that 75 percent of its students are low-income. One of its secrets, YES founder Chris Barbic notes, is that its students spend 62 percent more time in school than regular Houston public school students.

3. Measure each student by a high and incorruptible standard.

For Escalante, this was the AP test. Both AP and IB exams are given each May in dozens of subjects. Unlike regular school final exams, they are very long (usually three hours for AP, five hours for IB), require much analytical thinking and writing, and are created and graded by outside experts who have nothing to do with the school. Escalante's students were impressed and motivated by the fact that they were preparing for the same college-level tests that were taken by the rich kids in west Los Angeles, and that if they did well they could earn college credit. This had some influence on Mamaroneck AP students too, but the school put less emphasis on all students taking the tests, and further reduced the number of test-takers by either barring students from taking the AP courses or at least not encouraging them to do so.

4. Create a team spirit.

Escalante had AP calculus team shirts and songs and chants. He harnessed the special dynamic of an AP or IB class in which everyone is going to take the test that the teacher did not write or grade. In a normal class, students try to persuade the teacher to go easy on them, and some teachers find it hard to resist the temptation. In an AP or IB class, dumbing down the final exam is not an option, so teacher and students are motivated to unite as a team to beat that test. There was some of this spirit in some Mamaroneck AP classes, since there were teachers who appreciated the power of uniting teenagers in a common goal, but average students at Mamaroneck who would have most benefited from this experience were shut out.

Today, many AP and IB teachers have learned from Escalante or teachers like him and swear by these four steps, or something like them. Such teachers persuaded me that the Challenge Index was a good idea and continue to tell me it helps them.

But there are, my e-mails and the Challenge Index data indicate, more teachers who think this approach to teaching is mindless and dangerous. They are professional educators who deserve respect, so let me share a quote from one of them that I used in the article "Why AP Matters" I wrote for this week's Newsweek:

"It is one thing for a bright student to be absorbed for hours working on a favorite subject. It is quite another story when an 'average student' struggles until two o'clock in the morning to master the massive amount of material of a course in which he has little interest. How much of a favor are we doing these youngsters?"

The teacher I quoted is Kathleen Donnison, a veteran AP American history teacher whom I first met in 1994 at Mamaroneck High School. She is still there, and many educators share her view.

I don't, and neither do hundreds of other AP and IB teachers I have met over the years. They would say that instead of telling this struggling student to drop the course, you should look for ways to help the student master the material and find the parts of it that have beauty and interest for him or her.

This is a debate among well-intentioned teachers that will yield useful results. What I know is the number of low-income and minority students taking AP and IB is increasing, as is the number of such students doing well on the tests. That is good, and I hope the trend continues.