U.S. News & World Report Ranks Nation’s ‘Best’ High Schools
U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings of the nation’s best high schools are out, and the results suggest students thrive when given access to curriculum and instruction that’s significantly more challenging than what a typical American student receives.
The top 15 campuses in the rankings include magnet schools, small
campuses offering specialized programs, and charter schools. Two of the top five
schools are part of the BASIS charter school
network in Arizona, which offers an intensive curriculum designed
to be comparable to international academic standards.
The news outlet’s formula for determining the best campuses is a
combination of overall school performance on statewide
proficiency tests, factoring in considerations for populations of
disadvantaged students who typically score lower on such
assessments. Schools that did well enough on those factors were
then evaluated for “college readiness,” using student achievement
on Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate (IB) exams.
(Because the data is self-reported by schools and states to a
federal database, errors can occur — which was the case for a
number of campuses in
last year’s rankings.)
It’s important to note that the rankings are a snapshot of a
school’s performance, rather than a definitive judgement.
However, they do shine a light on campuses that are exceeding
achievement benchmarks often with challenging student
populations.
More than 21,000 high schools in 49 states (Nebraska didn’t
report enough data to be considered) and the District of Columbia
were evaluated. U.S. News awarded gold, silver or bronze medals
to more than 4,805 top-performing schools. Just under 41 percent
of the rankings’ gold-medal schools receive Title I federal
funding, which is earmarked for campuses serving large
populations of students of students from low-income households.
California led the states with close to 28 percent of its high
schools earning gold or silver medals, followed by Maryland with
about 26 percent.
The two charter schools in the Top 5 are BASIS Tucson (No. 2) and
BASIS Scottsdale (No. 5). Created in 1998 by Michael and Olga
Block, BASIS serves about 5,000 students on eight campuses in
Arizona and recently opened a charter middle school in
Washington, D.C. serving about 400 students. For a second
consecutive year, the top-ranked campus was the School for the
Talented and Gifted in Dallas.
I asked Mary Riner, BASIS’ director of external relations, to
explain how the open-enrollment charter schools managed to score
so highly on U.S. News & World Report’s scale. She said one
reason is that the program’s intensive curriculum is more akin to
what would be expected of students in Asian and European
countries that score highly on international assessments.
Proponents of the new Common Core State
Standards, adopted by 46 states, contend the more rigorous
expectations will eventually help American students boost their
comparative performance on those same exams.
“By the time one of our kids takes AP chemistry or biology exam,
they’ve had five years of that subject,” Riner said. “We’ve taken
the best world standards in the humanities, math and sciences in
Europe and Asia and married them to the American-style freedom in
the classroom.”
Just how high are the academic standards at BASIS? Consider this
– the charter schools in Tucson and Scottsdale were among the 105
U.S. schools that took part in the Organization for Economic and
Cooperative Development (OECD) Test for Schools, which was based
on the Program for International Assessment (PISA) exam.
According to a new
report from education advocacy organization America Achieves,
BASIS students outscored the average student from Shanghai, which
ranked No. 1 in the world on the international assessment. The
BASIS Scottsdale campus was among the top 1 percent of schools in
the world in reading and mathematics.
To be sure, outscoring an “average” student in Shanghai isn’t the
same as beating that country’s top performers. But BASIS students
were also found to be several years ahead of their American
classmates when it came to proficiency in basic subjects.
BASIS’ track record thus far combined with its strong showing on
the new OECD exam
“is a sign that there is something in their formula that needs to
be replicated as quickly as possible because it seems to be
producing great results,” Nina Rees, president and CEO of the
National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, told me Monday.
Charter
schools have been slowly gaining in popularity since the first
independently operated public school opened 20 years ago.
Research on the success of the model is a varied as the types of
charter schools themselves. Some recent studies at the regional
and national level have found certain charter schools are making
gains with at-risk student populations. However, there is also
evidence suggesting that many charter school students
don’t do better than their peers at traditional public schools,
and many fare worse.
BASIS has plans for expansion and will open its first Texas
campus in San Antonio in August. However earlier this month the
D.C. Public Charter School Board turned down a request by BASIS
to add seats, citing the fact that about 10 percent of the
students had withdrawn since fall.
Paul Morrissey, head of BASIS’ D.C. campus, said that the student
attrition wasn’t unusual for the program’s first year. “When a
BASIS school comes into a new market, there are students who
understand and know what the workload is and what it takes to be
successful at BASIS, and there are students who are not prepared
to do that kind of work,” Morrissey said, according to a
Washington Post story.
Even if a public school is open enrollment, there is some
self-selection taking place among the student body. Magnet
schools typically require students to meet entrance requirements
and focus on intensive instruction in areas such as math,
technology, or international studies that attract already
high-achieving students. And a charter school can be “open
enrollment” by definition but still end up weeding out students
who are less likely to succeed under its model. For some kids the
academic demands are overwhelming, or there aren’t enough
extracurricular activities to meet their interests. Some families
balk at the longer academic day, additional homework and
requirements for parental involvement. That selectivity is why
the U.S. News rankings also include separate lists for
magnets and
charter schools.
So what’s the lesson from the U.S. News rankings? One message is
that there are certainly pockets of excellence among the nation’s
high schools and models well worth replicating. But the news
outlet’s list doesn’t tell us what happens to students once they
leave these elite schools: Are they more likely to enroll in
postsecondary education? How many of them require remedial
classes when they get to college? And what percentage of them
graduate on time? Shouldn’t those long-term outcomes also factor
into whether a school is judged to be successful?
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