The Best We Can Expect?

I don't want to overplay the reasons why I don't think Newsweek's "America's Best High Schools" list lives up to it's name, but, now that I've had a chance to look at this year's list, I've got a bit more to say.

One of the things I found most striking, when Andy and I were putting together our analysis of schools on last year's list, was that several schools in the "Top 100" reported half or fewer of their African American students graduating. All of those schools are still on Newsweek's list this year. (I haven't had a chance yet to see if any addition schools on this year's list have similarly low graduation rates.) Considering that a lot of states are still grossly underreporting the percentage of students who fail to graduate, this troubled me. Certainly, we know from research by the Manhattan Institute and Urban Institute that only slightly more than half of African American students nationwide graduate in four years, but shouldn't the schools on a list of the nation's "best" be doing better than that, rather than a little bit worse?

Now, Jay Mathews, who created the list, argues that including graduation rates in the analysis would mean high-poverty, high-minority schools will never make Newsweek's list of Top 100 schools, because their populations ensure they will have high drop-out rates. But I think that gives some of the schools on his list more credit than they deserve.

For example, Atlantic Community High School, in Delray Beach, Florida, ranked #25 on Newsweek's list, reported a 50 percent graduation rate for its African American students in 2004, according to its detailed NCLB report card from the Florida Department of Education. About 45 percent of the school's 2,000+ students are African American, and about 35 percent qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. That's not an affluent, lilly-white suburban school, like many on Newsweek's list, but it's not "high-poverty, high-minority," either. In fact, the percentage of economically disadvantaged students at Atlantic Community is lower than the statewide average in Florida, which is 46 percent. Now, I think it's a scandal that nearly half of Florida's kids are economically disadvantaged, but does that mean we shouldn't expect the state's high schools to get more than half their black students to graduation?

Further, there are schools on Jay's own list that prove him wrong. For example, this year's school #87, YES College Preparatory School in Houston, Texas, has a student enrollment that is 92 percent Hispanic, 5 percent black, and has 75 percent of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch--a higher percentage of economically disadvantaged students than all but one other school in Newsweek's list. But YES reports a 93.9 percent graduation rate, and 100 percent of its graduates are accepted to four-year colleges.

Atlantic may be doing great things for some of its students, but a method that ranks it higher than YES seems to defy common sense.