World's most bogus list of top high schools

Newsweek once again publishes the world’s most bogus list of top high schools.

Why is this list bogus? Because the sole criterion for ranking schools is the average number of Advanced Placement (AP) tests taken per student. The grades on the AP tests don’t even matter! Nor do any other measures of academic achievement obtained by the school’s students. If people ever start taking this list seriously, this will create the obvious incentive for high schools to game the system in ways that do nothing to improve the quality of their education.

Even worse, schools that have competitive admissions are excluded, so genuine top public high schools like Stuyvesant High School (“noted for its many accomplished alumni, its rigorous academics, and for sending the most students to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton of any public school in the United States”) are completely ignored.

One has to wonder if the inventor of this list, Jay Mathews, is receiving kickbacks from The College Board, the organization that makes money administering the AP tests. (Jay Mathews has a very long but pathetically bad article defending his list in today’s Washington Post.)

Newsweek should be ashamed of itself for perpetuating such crappy journalism.

UPDATE

Thanks to Kimberly Swaggart (who has an excellent education blog) and Orin Kerr of the Volokh Conspiracy for pointing out a newspaper article from Florida which reveals that the high school which is supposedly 10th “best” in the whole nation actually got a grade of D from the state of Florida.

Orin Kerr writes, “It doesn't take a genius to realize the silliness of the methodology used to determine Newsweek's rankings....”

Comments

[Jay Mathews]

I enjoyed the comments about the new Newsweek list. I hope critics will read the FAQ on newsweek.com before they make up their minds. I have written three books about high schools, and am convinced that the list is a needed boost for the notion that average students should be exposed to AP. My book Class Struggle lays out the case in the most detail. And I am not important enough to rate two Ts in my last name. It is just Mathews.

[Half Sigma]

Jay writes: "am convinced that the list is a needed boost for the notion that average students should be exposed to AP"

So you confess that the list is propaganda to convert people to your minority viewpoint about AP tests.

If Newsweek called the the list "the thousand high schools where students take the most AP tests" then I wouldn't have a complaint. But this list is deceiving the public into thinking some arbitrary schools are the "top" and "best" schools in the nation. (I bet less than 5% of readers even bother to figure out how the list was created--they just trust Newsweek's judgment.)

You're entitled to publicly write about and promote your views about AP tests, but when you and Newsweek collude to tell us these schools are the "top" and "best" schools, this is deceptive journalism and needs to be discredited.

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