<p>I do not know about ranking, but D’s HS is very well known and I believe that it made a difference in D’s acceptance to selective program (10 spots for incoming freshmen0.</p>
<p>Proxy: anecdotal, yes…not sure how one would actually follow up on this though…</p>
<p>I might add that the school being discussed in one in which honors classes were eliminated in favor of AP’s all four years so you could have a kid who was a “B” student in honors (respectable but not stellar) in mega number of AP’s throughout high school…and, yes, anecdotal, but I can’t imagine with that number of kids taking AP classes that the rigor is the same as one in which 10% of the class is permitted…</p>
<p>I guess a better measure would be the scores on the tests…but I don’t think I have seen this for the school in question…</p>
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At my son’s school they have kids fighting to be allowed to take <em>more</em> AP courses, because the school allows only juniors and seniors to take APs, and only three APs per year are allowed, with rare exceptions. And even within those limits, I have heard of students being discouraged from taking a particular AP course because their prior track record in that subject is not strong. I’d say the school’s philosophy is geared more toward maximizing the success of students who take AP courses than maximizing their numbers.</p>
<p>(In what may or may not be entirely unrelated news, the school has dropped in the rankings for two years in a row now…)</p>
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<p>Actually I know quite a lot about it, thank you. And I’m very familiar with Short Hills. However, “no slouches” financially is a far cry from 6 and 7 figure donations over a period of years.</p>
<p>Our school was a top 100 last year and isn’t on any of the lists this year. Did we just drop 1000+ places?</p>
<p>2 comments–most of these schools are not true publics–many if not most are magnet, charter, selective, math/science, etc. that function, in a way, like private schools.</p>
<p>I looked at my state’s results. LOL. There is only one “gold” school. It is in my metro area, and I never heard of it. Maybe it receives extra points for “poverty” and “disadvantaged students”? Now, I am not saying that this magnet school is not a good option for those in its troubled urban district who can get a place there. However, there are three excellent public districts in the area and not a single school from any of them is included at any level–I guess they didn’t participate. There are also a lot of, IMO, weak rural schools from this state listed at the bronze level, too.</p>
<p>People who live here know where the good schools are. (You can say this no matter where you live). No one would think of transferring out of a good district to go to any of the schools on this list. Worthless, IMO.</p>
<p>Dr. Burney, author of the Ed Week commentary, is a national leader in the field of education, who lives in Haddonfield, NJ. That district’s HS is ranked second in the Philadelphia area. Does she describe a uniquely disappointing experience, or one common in well-ranked high schools? </p>
<p>Are the “Best” Schools Really the Best?
In this Education Week article, charter school leader Deanna Burney faults a list of the fifty supposedly best public schools in her Pennsylvania/New Jersey region recently published in Philadelphia magazine. Her own son attended one of the high schools on the list and encountered plenty of ineffective and indifferent instruction and lost much of his love for science, which made her look more closely at the criteria for ranking schools.</p>
<p>The Top 50 list was determined by schools’ high SAT scores, extracurricular activities, and facilities. “There’s no denying that students in them benefit on many levels from such relative abundance,” says Burney. “But in terms of teaching individual learners and maintaining focus on the core purpose of public schools – to provide rich educational opportunities for all kids – this wealth of resources no more guarantees educational quality than a well-appointed house guarantees a happy family.” </p>
<p>Lists like these, she argues, don’t measure what really matters – the quality of teaching in every classroom. By focusing on attainment statistics, what they really reflect is the socioeconomic composition of their student body – students who enter with numerous advantages and are in most cases willing and able to jump through the hoops and get the credentials they need. Top-schools lists don’t shed any new light on real school quality and “reinforce a culture that is damaging to many students – those who languish because educators fail to take their needs into account and provide them with the support and instruction that will enable them to succeed.”</p>
<p>What would a truly good school look like? Burney says it would focus on the “progress of each student, his or her performance, rather than attainment through compliant coursetaking. It would continually gauge student learning throughout the year, and intervene when work effort or quality seemed to decline, addressing issues of motivation and interest, providing the resources and instruction each student needed to learn at high levels. It would connect students’ learning to the world outside school, so that they remained engaged and enthusiastic. It would ensure that every teacher was a knowledgeable and capable teacher with the time, skill, and inclination to reach every student.”</p>
<p><!–[if !supportEmptyParas]–> <!–[endif]–></p>
<p>“What Do School Rankings Really Mean?” by Deanna Burney in Education Week, Dec. 9, 2009 (Vol. 29, #14, p. 23, 25), available with subscription at </p>
<p>[Education</a> Week: December 9, 2009](<a href=“http://www.edweek.org/ew/toc/2009/12/09/index.html]Education”>December 9, 2009)</p>
<p>Citation for the item in the above post:</p>
<p>[The</a> Marshall Memo - Article Headlines](<a href=“http://www.marshallmemo.com/headlines.php]The”>http://www.marshallmemo.com/headlines.php)</p>
<p>The Marshall Memo, published since 2003, is designed to keep principals, teachers, superintendents, and others very well-informed on current research and best practices in the field. Kim Marshall, drawing on his experience as a teacher, principal, central office administrator, consultant, and writer, lightens the load of busy educators by serving as their “designated reader.”</p>
<p>To produce the Marshall Memo, Kim subscribes to 44 carefully-chosen publications and looks through scores of articles each week to select 5-10 that have the greatest potential to improve teaching, leadership, and learning. He then writes a brief summary of each article, provides e-links to full articles when available, highlights a few striking quotes, and e-mails the Memo to subscribers every Monday.</p>
<p>The high school rankings were not a topic of conversation here. I couldn’t care less about what USNews thinks and if we do discuss rankings, we probably have the same problems with the methodologies that you do. The school profiles give us the information we need to assess the curriculum a school.</p>
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That’s Washington Post columnist Jay Matthew’s methodology.</p>
<p>Unlike the US News college rankings, which have at least evolved a coherent methodology that a reasonable number of people accept as predictive, if not entirely accurate, high school rankings are still complete crap.</p>
<p>In Newsweek’s high school rankings, my son’s current high school was ranked highly one year, then moved to a special, separate list because it was still very good but didn’t meet the criteria for inclusion in the regular rankings, to being dropped from the rankings and special lists altogether, for reasons I don’t know. It was the same, wonderful school all three years.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t think that the better professionals among adcoms pay much attention to rankings, because it’s their business to know something about high schools. I hope that’s true.</p>
<p>Sorry, but there’s no way colleges see the level of doations from affluent public school kids that they see from elite private school families There are exceptions, but the big dollars come from private schools families. Not saying there are not some generous public schools families, but as someone who has raised funds for an ivy for many years, it’s not even close.</p>
<p>Also, this site has credible, quantative reviews of prep schools:</p>
<p>[Prep</a> Review - America’s Best Private Schools 2010](<a href=“http://www.prepreview.com/ranking/us/private_schools.php?gclid=CPqijrLn2Z4CFRshnAod1WRkKg]Prep”>http://www.prepreview.com/ranking/us/private_schools.php?gclid=CPqijrLn2Z4CFRshnAod1WRkKg)</p>
<p>The rankings are misleading because a community of highly educated people with enough money to afford tutors, etc will make even a school with awful teachers look good.</p>
<p>And schools know how to game the system, such as by teaching to the tests, not allowing poor students to take the tests, etc</p>
<p>I am continually amazed by the number of kids in our public HS (highly ranked) who use tutors for their Honors and AP courses (and, of course, SATs too). These are kids who score well on standardized tests–but have teachers who are absentee, or know the subject but not how to teach it well, or who are inexperienced and unmentored, or who are harsh graders, etc., etc…Many kids who get 4’s and 5’s on AP tests have worked pretty intensively with outside tutors or did not even take the AP course in the HS, but did the work elsewhere. The teachers’ union weilds way too much power, and the administrators don’t hold the teachers accountable, and furthermore are ignorant about the number of kids who resorted to private tutoring on raising scores. </p>
<p>So those rankings based on AP scores are terribly misleading about the quality of the public HS education. Parents here joke that it is the tutors who earned the rankings, not the district. People budget for tutors according to which teachers are assigned to teach their kids’ courses. It is that bad.</p>
<p>MomPhD,
You are pointing to the reasons to send kids to Private schools. It is really worthwhile and saves whole tons of $$ in a long run (when considering cost of college, greater chances of getting best campus jobs / internships,…etc.)</p>
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<p>Why should academics be any different that the number of kids who have private coaches/trainers for athletics, for theater, for…</p>
<p>I think the point is that a high school whose students do well academically is not necessarily a great high school. It could be that the kids get a lot of extra help, independent of the school itself. If you took all the kids in Beverly Hills and sent them to school in Compton, they’d do quite well. That’s not a good reason for you to send your kids to school in Compton.</p>
<p>Miami, I agree. After my eyes were opened as to what really went on in classrooms, I would have gone with a private school if there had been any good options nearby, believe me (finances permitting). Lots of people here do that calculation–cost of tutors and property taxes vs. private school tuition. A good few have moved away. But the district PR machine keeps 'em coming, and no one wants to speak up publicly, for fear of dropping their own property values.</p>
<p>I have to wonder if other affluent public HSs are like ours.</p>
<p>MomPhD,
Not much we can do about our taxes. All people who send their kids to Private schools live in affluent public school districts. Yes, we are stuck paying both, very high real estate tax and huge Private school tuition (was very high even after D’s Merit scholarship that she got for all 4 years at HS based on her placement test results). Still it was all worth it. We are no paying college tuition because of her renewable Merits, she got the best job on campus (Chem prof. Supplemental Instructor), easily got Med. Research lab internship, volunteering position of her choice, nominated for Sorority Pres. (declined because of other time commitment), so far very high GPA. D. credits all of it, including superior verbal / written communications skills to her HS. In addition to high quality college prep. her HS made her work very hard, no shock stepping up to college amount of work.</p>
<p>I find it hilarious that Newcomer High School in Long Island City, Queens, NY is in the top 10. For those of you who aren’t familiar with NYC public schools, the Newcomer schools are for immigrants who have resided in the US for less than 3 years when they start high school. They do a great job with immigrant kids, but …</p>