(Over)Simply the Best?

Newsweek's annual list of America's Best High Schools is up online now. Earlier this year, Andy and I wrote a piece raising some concerns with Newsweek's methodology--particularly how the list ignores schools' graduation rates and equity between student subgroups in a school. Jay Mathews, who creates the list, has been kind enough to engage with Andy and me in a dialogue about those concerns, which he mentions in this story.

This year there are two changes in Newsweek's rankings. First, Mathews et. al. opened the list up to include more schools that admit students on a competitive basis (previously, schools that selected more than half of their students competitively were excluded). Second, each school's information is now accompanied by an "Equity and Excellence Percentage" (E and E%), which reflects the percentage of a school's senior class that passed at least one AP exam. The E and E% is an interesting idea, but I think it would be more useful if Newsweek allowed readers to look at the two different pieces of information that comprise it--1.) across what share of a school's students the AP tests that contribute to the school's ranking are distributed, and 2.) how students performed on those tests--separately, since they are very different concepts. (Just to be clear: Newsweek doesn't have these two separate pieces of information and combine them to create the E and E %. But the E and E %, as calculated, conflates those two pieces of information into one statistic.)

And, if you want to know what I really think, check me out on Newsweek radio, here.