The Top of the Class

The Charlotte Mecklenburg School board has voted to destroy the Myers Park High School IB Magnet; reducing the IB student enrollment significantly. The magnet IB would go to another school (if they choose). The result will be Myers park falling in the ratings; even though it is the highest ranked School in Charlotte. Many students will go to their home school and not continue with IB. How sad, shortsighted and political. You would think the board would want to attract businesses to Charlotte; and keep great schools great- not attempt to "build" other schools by knocking others down.

I think its funny that 8 out of the top 10 public shools are in the South. I live in California and everybody out here talks about southerners like they are retards. I wouldn't be suprised if all of those schools were 90-100% White or Asian. Its the forced integration that really hurts a lot of public schools. I think Blacks, Whites, and Hispanics liked it better when schools were segregated. I also firmly believe that students preform better, show more enthusiasm, and more team/group effort when surrounded by peers of the same race, religion, and neighborhood. Its when you force all these different types of people together that ruins public schools. It eliminates uniformity which inevidibly lowers efficiency. If you go to a lunch break at any highschool in the country you will see that at least 85% of students automatically segregate themselves within the school. Each group has their own eating area and students naturally know which ones they belong at and which ones they have no business eating at. But even with students naturally segregating themselves we still see on average a 200-500% increase in violent crime in highschools that bus in minorities from far away neighborhoods. (as compared to when the school was majority one race from the same neighborhood, before forced integration). I live in a majority white town where the average household annual income is well over 100k. Unfortuantely I could not go to the public highschool because of the 2800 students at Pacific Palisades HIgh School, 2500 of them are bused in from downtown los angeles (aka northern TIjuana). Parents deemed the school too dangerous and made me take a 2 hour bus ride (each way) to a $15,000 per year private school. I had to sacrifice, and my parents had to sacrifice. Its sad that you can't go to the public school in your own neighborhood because its full of scum from a different neighborhood. Its sad that you get raped by property tax (which funds public schools) and the public school in your nice suburban neighborhood are full of dangerous mexican vermin. Once they took over the public highschool in my quiet town, the number of crimes in the are sky rocketed. As well as the number of violent crimes in and around the school. The amount of litter and trash around the school went up at least 1000% (maybe more) If we went back to segregation with controlled diversity I think we could produce better students and safer neighborhoods.

Where is #1392? That is supposed to be Manhattan High School in Manhattan, Kansas!

I came to see this site after hearing that my daughter's school was in the top 400 in the nation. After reviewing the criteria used to rate the schools I am far less than impressed. All this so called list of 'top' U.S. high schools does is rate school's abilities to manipulate grades and rankings on standardized tests.
Let's take 2 extreme cases a examples. School #1 manages to graduate 100% of seniors and all graduates take 2 of the aforementioned tests. Their index is a 2, putting them at about rank 600. School #2 requires 100 of students to take at least 10 standardized tests each then only graduates a single person. Their index rating is 1000 and they are the highest ranked school in the U.S.! Congratulations, you just succeeded by failing 99% of your students!

As a former admission director at one of the nation's most selective universities, I look at this list and scratch my head. Sure, these schools may be turning out students who've become adept at completing standardized tests, but their top graduates are not typically among an applicant pool's most impressive thinkers, problem solvers, or writers. They have no passion, no creativity. In short, they don't show that they have what it takes to be great scholars, researchers or leaders. There are many exceptional public high schools in this country, they're just not on this list.

The ranking seems to be a terrible distortion. My child's school made the list. All juniors are required to to take the Cambrige test. Students are encouraged to take AP classes regardless of their ability to pass the class. The failure rate is staggering at the school. Students are told an 20 on the ACT is a good score. The school has a 40% drop out rate. Months are taken out of regular course work to practice taking these taking this tests and taking samples of old versions of these tests, studying old versions of these tests and the students still fail miserably. There are a huge violence probllems, gang problems, drug problems and teenage pregnancy problems at the school. Also, besides being over 85% low income there is a huge population of students classied with learning disabilities.

Gaging a school solely on whether they give certain tests and totlally ignoring the results is horribly flawed Dividing the number of graduates by the never of tests given when not just the graduates are taking the tests and large populations of the are taking all three tests is a huge distoration and has nothing to do with the sucess of the school.

Last year only one student suceeded in getting an IB diploma. Most of the students fail out of the IB program. They are told they couldn't possibly excel on any of the tests and at best maybe they would be able to pass them with the minimum allowable score..

The Cambrige, AP and IB tests are paid for by the school.

What has happened with having subjects taught in way that they can develop critical thinking skills and then being tested on what they have learned as a gage of the success of a school.