This week, Newsweek and Jay Mathews (both of the Washington Post) released their annual Challenge Index of top U.S. public high schools, which ranks schools based on the number of AP or IB tests given divided by the number of graduating seniors. People like lists, and the Challenge Index always gets a lot of attention despite being heavily criticized for inaccuracy and irrelevance.
For example, the highest-ranking District school, Bell Multicultural High School, comes in at 76 on the list. Bell is a rigorous school in comparison with others in D.C., but is it the 76th best public high school in the U.S.? Probably not — as we’ve discussed before, it requires all of its upperclassmen to take at least one AP exam, has an extremely small graduating class because of its large number of dropouts, but consequently fares well on Mathews’s metric. You can see how other area schools placed in the Post’s interactive graphic.
Yesterday, Mathews was online for a live discussion about the index, the first question of which came from an AP calculus teacher in Richmond who wrote,
Every year, fully half of the students in my AP class have no business being there. These students are in my class because of a horrible combination of parental and student over-estimation of their abilities and a school (and school district) policy designed to boost our ranking in your index.
He went on to ask if those students would not be better served by mastering grade-level content, rather than AP for AP’s sake. Mathews’s response was essentially to tell the teacher to watch the movie Stand and Deliver (or rather, read his book about Jaime Escalante, the teacher depicted in Stand and Deliver), implying that if the Richmond teacher was working as hard as Escalante, his students would be passing the AP calculus exam.
High expectations for students? Absolutely. But Stand and Deliver-type pathos isn’t a reasonable response to the mess that is the Challenge Index or the trend towards mandated APs. Collecting and understanding schools data is a complicated business, and the Challenge Index doesn’t tell us much that is useful about the effectiveness of area schools. In Mathew’s defense, he acknowledges the Index’s faults and will debate them at length, but argues that his metric makes the best use of available data. We’re inclined to disagree, and suggest that using the number of AP exams passed, instead of just the ones taken, is a simple revision that would go a long way.
