Ranking High Schools, 2006

SEED and Booker T. Washington are both small charter schools that just started AP. They gave many tests this year, but had almost no students pass them. Garfield started AP the same way. Teachers decided they had to have the AP courses and tests in place from the beginning or they could not inspire the effort needed over the long term to raise the passing rates.

Notice my second list that looks at the same group of low-income schools (31 of the 184 ranked by The Post have at least 40 percent of students qualifying for lunch subsidies), but from a new angle. For the second year, the Challenge Index gives the Equity and Excellence rate for most schools. This is the percentage of all graduating seniors who have had at least one passing score on one college-level exam in high school. The second list shows the top 10 low-income schools ranked by Equity and Excellence rates.

This is a new statistic. Not all schools were able to calculate it for their senior class. So I have estimated what the rate might be for those schools, based on their AP and IB test passing rates and other indicators. It shows Wilson and the suburban schools doing the best, which is not surprising because they have the resources and reputations to hire and keep top AP talent and enough middle-class students to guarantee a respectable start.

There are problems with slicing up the Challenge Index list this way. I am overlooking two schools that ranked ahead of Wakefield, Banneker in D.C. and Falls Church in Fairfax County, that came close to making the low-income list with subsidized lunch percentages of 39 percent and 37 percent respectively. All of these numbers -- college-test participation, low-income student percentage, Equity and Excellence rate -- are only parts of what define American high schools. At Garfield and Wakefield, for instance, you need to watch the principal and teachers in action to understand what the statistics mean.

But using the Challenge Index numbers to compare schools can be illuminating. Consider my third list, the 28 school districts in the Washington area ranked by their average Challenge Index rating. At the bottom is Frederick County, Va., a rural district with three small high schools, Millbrook, Sherando and James Wood.

It looks bad to rank, as Frederick does, below its neighbors, and even below low-income districts like D.C., when none of Frederick's high schools have more than 17 percent low-income students. This is only the second year I have included Frederick on the list. The Challenge Index is new to Frederick administrators. Frederick County School Superintendent Patricia Taylor, a smart educator, called me to ask some questions and point out what she considered flaws in the analysis.

She said Frederick would have had a higher rating if I had counted the many community college course exams her students take. I told her I could not count exams written and graded by her employees, which many of those college exams are, because they lack the independence and incorruptibility of AP and IB exams, the standard for this list. She said she thought that was an inappropriate distinction and noted that some Northern Virginia districts pay the AP and IB test fees and require all students in the courses to take them, which I think is a good idea. She also said it was wrong to rate schools based on such a narrow criteria. "One isolated assessment is not a quality maker," she said.

I told her that most educators agree with her, but the successful AP and IB teachers who have influenced me say that participation in independently written and graded college-course tests is a useful indicator of which schools are taking seriously their duty to prepare students for college, and which are not.

I think it would be helpful if she took note of the much higher Challenge Index ratings of other rural districts, such as Clarke County, Va., which tops the list of Washington area districts. She might talk to Clarke County superintendent Eleanor Smalley, who has built a very strong IB program.

And she might call Wakefield High School people like Jackson, Reid, Beitler, Bushong, Bell, Fraley, Grill, Kelly and Lutz. They will undoubtedly agree with her that one isolated assessment is not a quality maker, but it can lead good educators to ask questions about what they might be doing better, and bring more students the quality courses they deserve.