FAQ: Best High Schools

As for high schools rejecting AP, there are about 50 that have done that. They are almost all private, expensive, and represent less than two tenths of one percent of the nation's high schools.  Thousands of high schools, by contrast, are opening more AP or IB courses, which they say are the only national programs that provide a high and incorruptible standard for student learning.

Because AP and IB exams are written and scored by outside experts, it's impossible to water down an AP or IB course without exposing what you have done---unless of course you make sure very few of the students take the tests. That is why we count tests, not courses, for the index. And as for teacher creativity, AP and IB encourages it more than any other high-school program I know. The tests reward creative thinking and original analysis. Creative teachers who produce creative students find their AP and IB test scores are very high.

15. Even AP teachers don't like the NEWSWEEK list. Some whose schools made the list are its biggest critics. What do you think of that?
They are smart and hard-working educators who are entitled to their opinions. But so are those AP teachers who tell me the list helps them gain support for their students. Here is what Brian Rodriguez, who teaches AP American history and AP European history at Encinal High School in Alameda, Calif., told me about the impact of AP on non-AP courses in a school with many low-income and minority students:

"AP teachers rarely teach only AP classes. They have many other responsibilities to their department, collaborative educational focus groups, and as liaison to our middle schools. The AP techniques honed in years of teaching or gleaned from seminars are used in the regular classrooms (at a slower pace, but no less effective). For instance, I am teaching a unit on Vietnam to my regular U.S. history class. I will use the PowerPoint lecture I developed for my AP class on that subject, teach the students to take notes, use the Socratic method discussion techniques so effective in AP classes, and then teach writing methods and tips I use so effectively in my AP classes. In addition, I will teach these techniques to our new teachers at history department meetings, prepare a pamphlet on multiple choice testing techniques that was distributed to all the teachers at our school to prepare them for state standardized testing, and then visit our local middle schools to make a presentation to the teachers there.  In summary, AP teaching can be school wide, and raises all the ships in the harbor.

Methodology:
NEWSWEEK published its first list of top U.S. high schools 10 years ago. It was based on a school-assessment method I invented to dramatize my distress at the way the vast majority of high schools were barring students from challenging courses. One C student I knew was so angry at being denied a chance to take Advanced Placement U.S. history that she studied on her own and passed the AP test, but her school still would not change its rules. My list would compare such schools unfavorably with their few enlightened neighbors. I knew many principals and superintendents were not going to like it.

Here are the first words of my introduction to what I call the Challenge Index, published in my 1998 book, "Class Struggle: What's Wrong (and Right) about America's Best Public High Schools," from which NEWSWEEK took that first list of 243 ranked schools:

"Nearly every professional educator will tell you that ranking schools is counterproductive, unscientific, hurtful and wrong. Every likely criteria you might use in such an evaluation is going to be narrow and distorted. A school that stumbles one year may be fine the next. I accept all those arguments. Yet as a reporter and as a parent, I think that in some circumstances a ranking system, no matter how limited, can be useful."

In the 10 years since I have received tens of thousands of e-mails from educators, parents, students and taxpayers about the NEWSWEEK list.  They have mixed views on my attempt to force a discussion of high-school rigor by listing in NEWSWEEK those few schools that have encouraged more students to take Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Cambridge courses and tests. This year the most far-sighted schools, nearly 1,400 of them, are ranked on Newsweek.com. That is only 5 percent of all U.S. high schools, but a big improvement from the 243 schools on the first list.

The method we use to calculate each school's index rating is simple, and can be applied by readers to their neighborhood schools. We count the total number of college-level exams taken at a school by ALL students each May, and divide by the number of graduating seniors. Any school with a ratio of 1.000 or higher, meaning it gave at least as many tests as it had graduates, is placed on the NEWSWEEK list.

Although simple, many educators tell me the measure captures, in a way other school statistics do not, a different attitude about students in the schools that make the list. Those schools turn out to have principals and teachers who are trying hardest to raise the achievement of each child, with college as a useful goal for all until students are old enough to decide what they want to do. "AP is the best thing to measure in a high school," said Tom Di Figlio, a veteran AP psychology teacher at Spanish River High School in Boca Raton, Fla., "because it is a real achievement test that marks proficiency in college-level courses."