Andy and Me: Two Ways to Rate High Schools

Riley had a problem, however, with the U.S. News screening method. "If a school meets expectations on state testing--but doesn't exceed expectations on this measure--it fails to pass through the gate and the number of kids who pass a nationally recognized test (AP) is never considered. I wonder if they have this backwards. A national measure puts all schools on the same playing field while state tests are wildly uneven in terms of their difficulty levels and knowledge and skills measured."

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Gerald N. Tirozzi, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said his organization "is not a proponent of school rankings. We recognize that the schools included on both the U.S. News and World Report and Newsweek Challenge Index lists are deserving of the honors they have received. But how can we truly compare one school to another when each state has its own set of standards? Until we have national standards, at the very least in the areas of reading and math, rankings of this type do not hold nearly as much weight as they could if all schools were on a level playing field."

Mel Riddile, a former National High School Principal of the Year who now runs T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, objected to the top U.S. News ranking for Jefferson. "Comparing schools that can improve test scores by sorting applications does nothing for schools like T.J. because they know they are good. They should be. They are the all-star team. U.S. News is terribly naive to construct a rating that compares results and fails to take into account inputs and processes. This rating, while it seeks to find the schools doing the best, only identifies schools that have the best. This ranking system is like comparing the American League All-Star team to that of the Baltimore Orioles who have not had a winning season for a decade and saying that the all-star team is statistically superior. This type of ranking does a disservice to efforts to reform or reinvent American high schools, because it says to school boards, communities, principals and teachers in diverse, open enrollment schools, that you can never be good unless you stack the deck. . . . The best schools are those that do the most with the students, all the students, who walk through their doors, not the best qualified applicants."

Dick Reed, a very active high school parent in Fairfax County, who has studied the AP and IB programs, said the U.S. News rankings were "a good list, though I have quibbles," mostly having to do with the complex format. "It would be almost impossible for an interested person to do their own comparative scoring. If all that's wanted are the top schools, it's fine. If I wanted to get my school in this list somehow, I would have almost no idea how to do so. That's not true with the Challenge Index. To get higher on the Challenge Index, I simply press my school to encourage more students to take IB or AP classes. Nothing more need be done--nothing more can be done. With the new list, there's far more involved and almost none of those things can be affected by an individual."

Reed endorsed, however, the idea behind both lists: "People are naturally competitive. Harness that instinct and use it to raise the performance of a school."

There are limits to the usefulness of this competitive instinct, of course. To see it taken to its hilarious extremes, check out the high schools the Wall Street Journal ranked last Friday as the most likely to get your child into eight selective colleges, including Harvard and Princeton. They were almost all very expensive private schools, or very selective public ones, including Jefferson (roughly 36th out of 40 schools.) The accompanying articles mentioned that these schools have counselors who are experts on gaming the admissions process, but did not note another explanation for their success: They likely have the largest percentage of parents who are alumni of the targeted colleges, thus getting extra legacy points for their kids.

I hope there will be many more discussions of what really makes a good high school. As a U.S. News statement explained, the new list was inspired in part by an article Rotherham and research colleague Sara Mead wrote saying it was wrong for the Newsweek list to include large urban schools that had strong AP or IB programs but low average scores on state tests and high dropout rates. They let me respond on Rotherham's Web site, educationsector.org. I said those schools most needed and deserved the encouragement of recognition in a national list. The Challenge Index grew from my five years of writing a book about Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, where AP teachers had changed hundreds of lives despite being in a very large urban school with poor state test scores because of the steady influx of low-income Hispanic students. Garfield proved those students could perform very well on AP exams if given extra time and encouragement. The list was designed in part to show other such inner-city schools they could do the same for many of their students if they followed Garfield's example.

Rotherham argued that Garfield's achievements were admirable, but until inner-city educators found a way to raise state test scores and lower dropout rates for all students, they did not deserve to be recognized on a national list. I said those were diseases for which there was yet no cure, and those schools should not be denied recognition because they have not solved problems that remain insoluble.

There are some possible solutions, of course, on which both Rotherham and I agree. We have on each of our lists a few inner-city high schools like YES in Houston and Preuss in San Diego, which have shown what small charter schools intensely focused on raising low-income student achievement can do. My hope is that both the Newsweek and U.S. News lists will evolve toward our shared goal -- improving education for the many American children who are not getting the teaching they deserve. We are both searching for schools to celebrate, but in different ways. The U.S. News list reminds me of a big government operation, with satellite data and computers, tracking schools from 200 miles up. Those of us working on the Challenge Index at Newsweek and The Post are on the ground, peeking into schools, calling or faxing or e-mailing principals, teachers and counselors, collecting their data, discussing their initiatives and asking them for their reactions to what we are doing.

Rotherham, Gazzerro and the fine journalists at U.S. News are going to discover that when they don't put a high-achieving school on their list, many people will inquire about that. Alumni of Benjamin Banneker Academic High School in the District--which along with 10 states was unable to provide data to U.S. News--are already complaining about their school going unmentioned. Fairfax County, the largest school district in Rotherham's state, Virginia, has all 25 high schools (not counting Jefferson) on the Newsweek list of 1,350 schools, the top 5 percent in the United States, but only five, including Jefferson, on the U.S. News list. I suspect he will be hearing from those left out, all part of the learning process for us school-rating scoundrels.

Join me for a live chat online today at 2 p.m. at washingtonpost.com.