NYT article on US News & World Report (High School Rankings, but look deeper)

Colleges and Universities A-Z Columbia University
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<p>From the NYT Education section. I am surprised at the openness of the US News & World Report Board on blatant capitalism (I know I know). What does this say about all those arguments that the rankings are very subjective, i.e. "whatever sells"?:</p>

<p>On Education
Putting a Curious Eye on a High School Ranking System
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<p>By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: December 5, 2007
That venerable sage, the funk musician Rick James, once said, “R&B stands for rhythm and business.” His aphorism is worth remembering while paging through this week’s issue of U.S. News & World Report, which includes the magazine’s first ranking of high schools.</p>

<p>Whatever this list represents in terms of journalism or public service, it must be understood also as an exercise in business, in extending the U.S. News brand, in helping it survive in a financial and technological climate hostile to news magazines. Having devoted annual issues to ranking colleges, graduate schools and hospitals, U.S. News has now brought the same approach to secondary education.</p>

<p>The magazine’s executives frankly acknowledge their economic motivations. In a recent interview, the publisher, Kerry F. Dyer, and the editor, Brian Kelly, referred to the high school ranking as part of a “franchise.” </p>

<p>But Mr. Kelly also rose to the journalistic defense of his magazine, speaking of the “church-state separation” between the editorial and business functions. Of the college ranking, which U.S. News began in 1983, he said, “The origin was not as a commercial tool but journalistic curiosity.” </p>

<p>The executives also said that they hoped the ranking would inspire a public conversation about what makes a good school. But the ranking raises a more fundamental, disturbing issue. The ranking is a centerpiece of what we might call the Anxiety Industry, the same booming market that includes test-prep classes and private college-admissions consultants. Nobody should feel exactly sanguine about that reality.</p>

<p>“I thought it’s admirable the way the rankings were done,” said David F. Labaree, the associate dean of the Stanford University School of Education. “But if U.S. News’s niche is rankings, that’s a little disquieting. It’s in the magazine’s interest to push rankings into every sector to expand its niche. And that exacerbates the rankings mania that’s harming education at all levels.”</p>

<p>You could dismiss Mr. Labaree as an egghead purist, except that people who make their living coldbloodedly analyzing the marketplace speak in similar terms about the magazine’s interest in ranking high schools.</p>

<p>“U.S. News has made the decision to basically pin its business model on rankings,” said Mark M. Edmiston, a managing director of Admedia Partners, an investment banking company. “They’ve basically given up the battle of competing with Time and Newsweek directly and carved out this niche of being the ranker.”</p>

<p>In a capitalist society, of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with selling information for profit. As both a journalist and a journalism professor, I have to root for serious publications to succeed rather than fail. Peddling academic rankings is not peddling rumors about Britney Spears.</p>

<p>Nor can you blame U.S. News for filling the vacuum left by the absence of any meaningful federal standard for comparing schools. The No Child Left Behind law let each state set its own standards for academic proficiency. The wildly variable benchmarks, especially in chronically weak states, too often subscribed to the Limbo Rock Rule: How low can you go?</p>

<p>The factors the ranking used appear sensible and supple — overall student achievement, academic performance of the most disadvantaged students, college readiness as reckoned by results on Advanced Placement tests. </p>

<p>The resulting lists of 100 “gold medal” schools include plenty of knock-me-over-with-a-feather nonsurprises, like Stuyvesant and Boston Latin. The top-rated school, Thomas Jefferson in Alexandria, Va., admits only a fraction of applicants from a five-county area and has extensive financial support from regional high-tech companies. There are also some intriguing discoveries like Hidalgo High School in southern Texas, a heavily immigrant, entirely Hispanic school with a 94 percent graduation rate.</p>

<p>AND yet — and yet — it is hard not to get a little queasy hearing Mr. Dyer explain how the ranking is the magazine’s franchise so that, he said, when you think high school ranking, you think U.S. News, not only the particular issue of the magazine but also the Web site content and spinoff books. It is the formula U.S. News has perfected with its college ranking.</p>

<p>“What’s amazing,” Mr. Dyer said, “is how the average consumer knows that at 12:01 a.m. on a Friday in August, the college rankings are being released.”</p>

<p>Indeed, Mr. Dyer continued, within 72 hours of the release this year, the U.S. News Web site received 10 million page views. Generally, it has about 500,000 views a month for the year that the ranking and related content stay online.</p>

<p>Eighty percent of the visitors, Mr. Dyer said, directly enter the ranking section of the Web site rather than arriving through the magazine’s home page, where they might have read something about politics or the arts. Such single-minded pursuit of data is considered desirable in the media business; the term of approval for such a coveted trove of information is a “vertical.”</p>

<p>Even in the antiquated form of print on paper, the U.S. News college ranking is a proven draw. A typical college-ranking issue, Mr. Dyer said, sells 45,000 copies on the newsstand, 50 percent more than a routine issue. In book form, U.S. News sells hundreds of thousands of copies a year of its various college guides. And every year, there is a new crop of fretful high school seniors and high-strung parents.</p>

<p>“This,” Mr. Dyer said, “is a continually renewing market.” </p>

<p>Mr. Kelly, the magazine’s editor, added, “These things are annuities.”</p>

<p>The high school issue carried roughly 45 pages of advertising, about 25 percent above the seasonal average, Mr. Dyer said. America Online put the U.S. News list on its home page. On the three days that the ranking and 2,000 pages of supporting material were posted on the magazine’s Web site, it received five million page views, including 500,000 unique visitors. </p>

<p>Mr. Kelly said expanding the ranking into high schools was “not an ad-sales consideration but a branding consideration.” Isn’t an advertiser, though, primarily attracted by the brand?</p>

<p>A few days before the issue with the high school ranking was released, Mr. Dyer was riding on a commuter train into Manhattan, and overheard two fathers talking about where their children were applying to college. It was, for the publisher, a confirmation that U.S. News was offering the right product.</p>

<p>“We’ve expanded the footprint of the brand,” he said. “We have more people interacting with content than in the history of the magazine. And that, as Martha Stewart would say, is a good thing.”</p>

<p>Too bad Rick James, who died in 2004, isn’t around to offer a more skeptical opinion.</p>

<p>Samuel G. Freedman is a professor of journalism at Columbia University. His e-mail is <a href="mailto:sgfreedman@nytimes.com">sgfreedman@nytimes.com</a>.</p>

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<p>Go TJ! </p>

<p>Yeah, I go to Thomas Jefferson (the school rated #1 by US News and World Report's new list). We do have an admissions test, so it is unfair to place us in the same competition as high schools that just draw from the surrounding area. But the same goes for Stuyvesant, etc. Anyway, we've had lots of publicity recently, which is kind of fun and kind of annoying. These rankings are a mixed blessing.</p>

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<p>My greatest joy in 4 years of high school was crushing the top policy debate team from Stuyvesant in a major regional debate tournament. Beat them in the semifinals, and our other top team beat their B team, so Lexington closed down the tournament for finals. Those cocky bastards were our arch-enemies. </p>

<p>True public skool 4 eva, and all that.</p>

<hr>

<p>Oh, this thread is about rankings, not bragging about your high school? Well, I think that all rankings are roughly equivalent in their value and in the harm they do in exacerbating the hysteria. Adding HS rankings does no additional harm.</p>

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<p>haha my mom was offered a job teaching at TJ Tech at 22 by the principal, and we used to live in Virginia really close by, jgoodwin18! I always wanted to go there, but hey. Geographic advantage for Columbia now because everyone in Austin goes to ACC or UT Austin :)</p>

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<p>
[quote]
Yeah, I go to Thomas Jefferson (the school rated #1 by US News and World Report's new list). We do have an admissions test, so it is unfair to place us in the same competition as high schools that just draw from the surrounding area. But the same goes for Stuyvesant, etc.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>I went to Stuyvesant. The validity of that is only partially true. The entrance exam is for multiple specialized public HS in NY. That test is all it takes to be admitted, So I'm sure it's quiet easier to gain admittance to than Stuy.</p>

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<p>rankings are such bull..they get annoying. stuy should be in the top 5, at least. and where is hunter??? it's not even on that list. with a public school that sends the greatest percentage of students in its graduating class to ivy league schools in the entire country, i would expect hunter to at least make it onto that list. anywho..i hope all of you feel better about your schools. and just as a fyi, stuyvesant is the most selective high school in the country, in terms of the # of people who apply (but that's probably just b/c its in nyc).</p>

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<p>High school rankings are worthless, they only consider how many people take AP exams, not how well they do in them. My school is a bit more selective in who can sign up for an exam, and we tend to do a lot better than other schools around our area (who, happen to be on the gold list).</p>

<p>We also provide other college level courses, which can be just as difficult, but they aren't taken into consideration.</p>