The Best High Schools

The solution, AP and IB advocates say, is not barring students from the courses but enriching the curriculum in lower grades to get them ready. The San Diego-based organization Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) identifies struggling middle-school students whose academic lives can be transformed with simple lessons in note-taking and time management. The Dallas-based O'Donnell Foundation, using an idea pioneered by University of Texas professor Uri Treisman, finances sessions in which high-school teachers show their middle-school counterparts what students need to get ready for AP. Fannie Mack, assistant principal at A. Philip Randolph High School in New York City, says she realized while creating an AP English class at that Harlem school that she first had to add muscle to the lower-level courses. "In the ninth grade," she says, "they were doing no more than writing autobiographies, reading Anne Frank and 'Raisin in the Sun' and calling it a day." She spread the word that a student who struggled in an AP course and failed the AP examination was still better off than before.

In Rasheda Daniel's case, the failure to find money for her AP test has sparked a significant legal test of the need for challenging courses. Invited to dinner at a Sizzler restaurant by American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California legal director Mark Rosenbaum and a team of law interns, Daniel and another Inglewood student described indifferent teaching, missing textbooks and limited course offerings. A year later the ACLU has filed a civil-rights class-action suit against the state of California for inadequate access to AP courses and tests in hundreds of schools. Daniel, one of the leading plaintiffs, is determined this spring to take the history test she missed.

Freeman and his parents, Lucille and John Allegretti-Freeman, got school-board support to open a second AP class. Nick is now soaring through World War I and loving every minute of it. He had a 91 in AP history his last marking period, and seems certain to get a top score on the AP test. "I was upset when they tried to keep me out of the course," Freeman says, but that made him appreciate the experience all the more. AP history teacher Mark Diefendorf "is my favorite teacher," he says. "We have mock trials on issues like the truth about Columbus, or the big-business leaders of the 19th century. It's like college. He doesn't spoon-feed us." That's the kind of education all students deserve.

Public schools are ranked according to a ratio devised by Jay Mathews: the number of Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate tests taken by all students at a school in 1999 divided by the number of graduating seniors.