Newsweek names Dallas' School for the Talented and Gifted best high school in America 3:56 PM CT
03:59 PM CDT on Monday, June 14, 2010
Newsweek magazine has named Dallas’ School for the Talented and Gifted the best high school in America for the third time in four years.
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• Dallas 5th-graders on track for middle school
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• TAKS scores 2005-2009
• Class of 2007 first-year university grades
• AP classes at D-FW schools
• U.S. income and poverty estimates by school district and county, 2008
• Dallas 5th-graders on track for middle school
• North Texas school rankings 2009
• Texas schools accountability ratings 2009
Newsweek’s annual list of “America’s Best High Schools” depends on a single measure: the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests given at a school each year (to all students, not just seniors) divided by the number of graduating seniors. Scores on those exams don’t matter.
Some experts have criticized the methodology as narrow and misleading. Newsweek says it ignores scores because high schools can artificially boost their passing rates by letting only top students take the exams.
The result is that Newsweek gave high marks to some schools where barely anyone passed their exams. Take No. 26, Heron High School in Indiana. The school gave an average of six exams for every graduating senior – but only 5 percent of seniors passed at least one of those exams.
The Advanced Placement program has exploded across Texas in recent years, as educators try to expose more students to college-level work. But more than half of AP exams taken by Texas public high