The Best High Schools

Nick Freeman, an honor-roll student at Clayton A. Bouton High School in the hilly Albany suburb of Voorheesville, N.Y., had nearly a 90 average in social studies and English. Last spring a counselor urged him to sign up for Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. history because it would be wonderful preparation for college. He could indulge his love of political argument and writing. But school administrators said no. The AP course was only for A students. No B-plus wanna-bes, no matter how motivated, could get in.

At about the same time, 3,000 miles away in the worn linoleum halls of Inglewood High in South-Central Los Angeles, Rasheda Daniel was learning that despite her hard work in the very same AP history course, she would not be able to take the AP test necessary to earn college credit. It cost $50, even with the discount for low-income families. With her mother temporarily out of work, she did not have the money. Later Daniel learned that test-fee grants had been available, but no one in her school--as ignorant of the importance of academically challenging courses and tests as suburban Voorheesville--had told her.

For decades, American educators have been giving high-school students like Freeman and Daniel the message that they should not challenge themselves too much. The prevailing view is that average students in suburban schools, and even the best students in urban schools, risk failure, depression and tarnished transcripts if they try to get ahead of themselves and take college-level courses like AP or International Baccalaureate (IB). Students who defy such professional skepticism are often left to struggle on their own.

Now that attitude among educators is beginning to change, at least at the state and federal levels. In just the last year, new research and a series of legal and political developments have turned AP and IB courses, erstwhile academic boutiques for a thin upper slice of students, into instruments for social and educational change in the nation's 25,000 high schools. The doors to brain-expanding classes like calculus and European history are opening to students previously assigned to business math and sports literature, even though many teachers remain convinced that such challenges are too much of a strain for some.

Many Americans have never heard of AP or IB, the only two international high-school programs that consistently demand wide reading and rigorous thought. The list of high schools shown here ranks schools that try the hardest to involve students in these courses and tests, very different from the way schools are usually measured by test scores and college acceptances. AP and IB began with a very limited goal--to give prep-school students and diplomats' children more to do in their spare time than hang out at coffee bars or play golf. But in the last 25 years, these programs have evolved into proven devices for inspiring first-rate academic work by even disadvantaged teenagers. The AP and IB examinations are given in about 52 percent of American high schools each May. They take hours to complete and go against America's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" obsession with multiple-choice tests by using essays that must be graded by actual human beings.

Some teachers and parents complain that letting students like Freeman and Daniel take AP or IB courses will lower standards. Some A-plus students cringe at the questions B-average classmates ask AP teachers, as if not getting the lesson immediately were a social blunder akin to dirty hair or out-of-date sneakers. But the expansion of AP and IB is going ahead all the same. More than 1.1 million AP tests and 43,017 IB tests were given in 13,000 U.S. schools in 1999. Those numbers are expected to jump much higher this spring.