The Newsweek High School Rankings Boycott
A group of school superintendents recently sent a letter to the editor of Newsweek (U.S. News and Time magazine were copied) asking the magazine to omit high schools in their districts from its upcoming rankings. They have also said they will no longer submit the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate test data that make it possible for Newsweek to rank their districts' schools.
According to their letter, they:
"believe that all schools, communities—and your readers—are poorly served by Newsweek's persistent efforts to use a single statistic, the number of students who sit for A.P. or I.B. exams, to rank schools. The inventor of this flawed methodology, Jay Mathews has insisted that it is meaningful because A.P. or I.B. participation is the sole available nationwide measure of whether students take a rigorous program of study. He is right that there are few consistent measures of school quality, state-to-state, but that does not justify inappropriate use of the data that is available."
Mathews has responded to the superintendents in his Class Struggle blog.
The letter does not mention the U.S. News Best High Schools rankings, which were published for the first time in November 2007. Our multivariable ranking methodology—developed by School Evaluation Services, a K-12 education data research business run by Standard & Poor's—differs sharply from the single variable index used by Newsweek. U.S. News continues to work on improving our methodology for our next high school rankings. One goal is to add International Baccalaureate results to our ranking model.
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To the "former teacher"
Good job trying to stir up some good ol' fashioned American patriotism there, former teacher. There's one problem with that. The IB is an international program (that is what the I stands for, after all), meaning that the program exists in other countries as well. Shocking, isn't it?
I also fail to see how the UN's "promoting itself in the IB classes" would help it to attain government status. The IB diploma programme is aimed at students between the ages of 16 and 19 years old; the IB Primary and Middle Years programmes are aimed at even younger students. Unless I'm mistaken, students aren't responsible for the UN and it's government status or lack thereof. Also, how is an international perspective a bad thing, given the trend of globalization in today's world?
Finally, I've talked with several fellow IB students around the world and there are considerable differences in the way our respective programs are run. So it's not THE IB that was oppressing you, it was your school's coordinator. Finally, you talk as if the IB curriculum is stunted or something. There's a difference between "oppressively limited" and "extremely detailed." The IB syllabi and Vade Mecum are the latter. If vague is your idea of "free," then you probably had no business educating the leaders of tomorrow in the first place.
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High School Ranking should be titled PUBLIC High School Ranking
While I admire the obviously monumental effort that went into your ranking of educational institutions, there is a fundamental flaw in your high school rankings that at best be deemed a significant error, and at worst, blatantly false and misleading advertising. Middle class parents, like myself, do NOT merely assess public schools when looking at where they should send their child. Nevertheless, when confronted with the US News "BEST HIGH SCHOOLS IN AMERICA" I assumed that the title was in fact being truthful. But it took me about a half hour digging through the online version of your rankings to find ANY mention of the fact that your list DOES NOT INCLUDE independent private schools. I live in Philadelphia and am looking at several private Quaker schools as well as public schools. A parent has to consider everything these days in order to find their child a good education. So when I saw your article, I assumed that the title -- like your "BEST COLLEGES" rankings -- indicated inclusion of both state/city/public schools, as well as private. But weirdly, that is not the case and US News is clearly mislabeling it in hopes of sounding dramatically broad in its scope.
The fact is, what you put in your educational rankings is your business. But selling magazines based on false promises is another. The title of your high school ranking -- which is essentially marketing, and therefore the title falls under the category of "advertising" -- almost seems to go out of its way to avoid admitting that it DOES NOT review private schools. Frankly, I think you are opening yourself up to a class action lawsuit that cites incorrect labeling of your ranking as false and misleading advertising. Aside from that... after 30 minutes of searching, it made me VERY angry.
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