<p>and according to Jay Matthews..</p>
<p>It would be easier for Mathews to just get the school districts with the top 1000 average incomes. It would be pretty much the same list, but the ordering would likely be more accurate as some of the AP-crazed sunbelt schools would move down in the pack.</p>
<p>I am sorry to see that Jay matthews is getting such widespread attention- It was bad enough when his impact was felt only in D.C. The major complaint i have with his index is that he fails to adddress how well the student do on the AP or IB exams. Bodies in a classroom do not make for academic success or challeng IMHO.</p>
<p>I would question the accuracy based on my D's school (top 50). It IS a competitive admission magnet school, though they do give preference to URMs and local kids.</p>
<p>In the state rankings, they typically get a C or less, because the non magnet students are lucky if they graduate.</p>
<p>this year he added a column for subsidized school lunch...and, there are number of schools with %'s in the 20s and 30s, or higher.</p>
<p>interesteddad I surely hope that the colleges are abit more discerning than Jay Matthews is in his "analysis". The push to put kids in AP and IB classes in the DC metro area is bordering on absurd- but who can blame the principals, when the local and national papers report such findings without any critique.</p>
<p>I wonder how well this goes over with the new philosphy of questioning the value of APs.....and pushing kids through college too quickly/easily. </p>
<p>In my school of thought, the better the HS, the less need for APs. Everyone should be working at the same clip....and talent should be abundant. Once a school begins to separate students into subgroups of ability, things must begin to deteriorate somewhere.</p>
<p>BTW, Mathews' list leaves omits what is generally considered to be the best public high school in Massachusetts -- an urban exam school that has been the cream of the crop since long before there even were AP or IB tests. </p>
<p>I'll leave it to Mini to look at the details because he knows NYC better than I, but the list also appears to omit some the best public exam schools in the country from that urban area as well.</p>
<p>Mathews list is almost entirely comprised of wealthy suburban high schools. It is particularly biased towards states that are "AP crazy" -- the kind of schools where kids post messages asking if a dozen AP tests is enough to get into "an Ivy" or if they should travel to nearby schools to collect three or four more trophies.</p>
<p>I-dad;</p>
<p>in past years, Jay has excluded any school with a test-in requirement, and I assume he has done so this year. This, of course, eliminates many of what we consider 'top' high schools in our area, and most private schools.</p>
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Jay has excluded any school with a test-in requirement
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<p>I admit ahead of time that I don't understand much about the challenge index or having lots of AP necessarily implies being a great school. But doesn't the IB program require a test, and doesn't Richard Montgomery in Mont. County, MD have an IB program? That would be number 11 on this nice little list.</p>
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The push to put kids in AP and IB classes in the DC metro area is bordering on absurd-
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<p>Same thing in California. It appears that Texas and Florida are AP-crazy, too.</p>
<p>Massachusetts is decidedly not AP crazy, despite having pretty good public high schools. My D's school is not top of the heap, but it's solidly in the top quartile of Mass. high schools. It think it just started offering its 5th or 6th AP course. In some ways, I think the AP curriculum may have hurt the quality of the teaching, because it is so much driven by "teaching to the test". It is the same students and the same teacher, whether the course is called Honors Chemistry or AP Chemistry, so I don't see how the change in nomenclature and the addition of another standardized test changes the fundamental quality of the education. To me the whole thing is designed to appeal to those who feel the need to keep score and believe that their school is the "best" by some statistical measure. It doesn't have much to do with the underlying quality of education.</p>
<p>gp-phoenix:</p>
<p>sorry, I was unclear. By 'test-in', I meant any HS that requires a test for enrollment into that HS. </p>
<p>i-dad: as a a resident of an ap-crazy sate, I can't explain it -- it just is (perhaps due to increasing selectivity of the state flagships U's?).</p>
<p>Top kids at suburban high schools are just expected to take 2-3 aps jr year an 2-3 sr yr (more than 25% of students take Calc). </p>
<p>You are correct in that a major concern about ap's is teaching to the test, which I think maybe more problematic in the humanities -- more fact memorization and few, if any, research papers. </p>
<p>btw: in your example, Honors/college prep chem is a prereq to AP Chem in our district. Ditto, honors/college prep physics for AP physics.</p>
<p>It would be easier for Mathews to just get the school districts with the top 1000 average incomes
No sh__
THe top ranking district around here is also one of the wealthiest.
No testing to be admitted to the AP program and the superintendent pushes for a high turnout rate
The IB program does require testing though I thought although from what I have seen they don't turn anyone away
Bellevue also offers some of their AP classes online- through Paul Allens company Apex learning.</p>
<p>Our two homeschoolers want me to submit our house to Mathews for next year. Since we make bigtime use of AP tests to reinforce the validity of the kid's transcripts, we could top the list!</p>
<p>Of course, Mathews might object to the "name" the kids have picked for their school: they want to call it the Kick-A** academy."</p>
<p>Even in the top 10, the list has schools in which 0% of students qualify for free lunches and schools in which more than 60% of students qualify for free lunches. It's not just just a list of the wealthiest schools.</p>
<p>I do wonder, however, how many of the schools with lots of free lunch students actually have AP or IB magnet programs drawing in higher income students. That's the case for S's high school, which made the list based on the magnet program. Most of the free lunch students are not taking AP or IB.</p>
<p>Also, while there's no test score requirement to get into the high school, there is such a requirement to get into the magnet program.</p>
<p>emerald - you sould like you're from Mont. County, MD. Lol... but it does sound like lots of counties...</p>
<p>Well, I would eliminate any school without a substantial music program, or a substantial art program. And then I'd want an algorithm for the effectiveness of education among the bottom 50% of the student body (those most likely to need the "good school" in order to succeed.) Then I'd weight the scores according to the median income/housing price in the zip code in which the school is located.</p>
<p>Mathews rewards high schools that let kids take weak elective APs instead of rigorous high school courses. For example, for most kids, regular old physics is much tougher than AP Environmental Science. If a school requires its students to take basic bio, chem, and physics courses to graduate, and AP sciences can only be taken in addition to these basics, it is, according to Mathews, a worse high school than one that lets kids get away with only two years of science if the kids who don't take physics take an AP course instead. It MIGHT be something like AP Environmental Science, but it could also be AP psych, art history, etc. Yes, that's right...the high school where kids MUST take 3 years of science isn't as "good" as one where they can get away with taking only 2 years. If a kid takes AP Stats--a course I personally think is very worth while for non-math kids--his high school is "better" than if he takes precalculus. How dumb is this system? </p>
<p>You end up seeing these kids who have taken 9 or 10 APs, but haven't taken physics, precalculus, have only 2 years of a foreign language, etc. </p>
<p>The sad part is that the parents and kids are so deluded, they think this helps them get into college. The vast majority of college admissions offices are far more impressed by the kid who has taken bio, chem, physics, and AP bio or AP chem, or AP Physics than with a kid who takes bio, chem, AP psych and AP environmental science. </p>
<p>The kid who takes a foreign language up to the AP level and begins a second foreign lanuage, taking two years of it, is at least as impressive as the kid who takes a foreign langauage up to the AP level and AP art history and AP psych rather than two years of another language. </p>
<p>What makes it worse, is that Mathews doesn't care about the scores. Call the course AP US History, have 80% of the kids who bother to take a test get a one or a two and you are a better high school than one that offers regular old US History from which the top half of the class takes the AP test and scores a 4 or 5. </p>
<p>The pressure is on the superintendents in rich suburban districts to do well on this list, so they go along with "weighting" APs in gpa's , thus rewarding the kids who fill up with AP-lite courses like environmental science, psych, government, etc. rather than taking regular old physics or beginning a second foreign language.</p>
<p>Please note that I am NOT saying that the AP lite courses aren't valuable--they are. I'm just saying that taking a lot of them INSTEAD of taking the basics across the board in math, science, English, social sciences and history, and foreign language with at least 4 years in all of these is NOT more rigorous and that encouraging kids to do this in a myriad of ways, including weighting gpa's is a disservice to the young. Mathews and his ranking are hurting our public schools.</p>
<p>If the "challenge index" had any validity, (which I doubt) it was a one shot deal. After the first year, schools may try to move themselves up the ranking by simply signing students up for as many AP tests as possible. I am not even sure a student needs to take the AP class in order to take the test. So what are you really measuring? A large junior class relative to the graduating senior class will also bias the index upwards. Imagine if Kickash Academy had one graduating senior and a set of triplets as juniors... and they all took 4 AP tests... 4X4 divided by 1 = 16!! :)</p>
<p>I do not think that AP classes or IB classes have no place in a high school curriculum; however, the measurement of "how good" a particular HS is based on the number of kids in these classes makes little sense. As a parent of a D in a school with an IB program and 50%+ free and reduced lunch kids as well as a majority English non prime language kids and a principal and guidance office pushing kids to take many IB classes, I think things have gotten out of hand. In the end, the kids lose - I would not be surprised if, in our county, there were not a principal's reward for increasing the number of AP/IB kids enrolled in classes. as long as the Washington Post aand Newsweek continue to print these rankings without some analysis the trend will continue.</p>