High School Rankings Give Skewed View Of Campus Performance
The New York Times' Michael Winerip has a thoughtful take on how the popular practice of ranking high schools -- including Newsweek Magazine's vaunted list -- can result in a skewed view of campus performance.
Various publications, including U.S. News & World Report and the Daily Beast, use formulas that typically rank schools based how many students take Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes, and then score well on the related exams. Some of the formulas give schools credit for graduation rates and college-going rates. U.S. News' rankings this year were marred by reports of faulty data for two campuses in the Top 20. The problem stemmed from incorrect figures reported to the U.S. Department of Education's Common Core of Data, the federal database used by the publication to gather information about schools.
Winerip argues that these numerical compilations can't truly reflect how well a school is truly serving its
Various publications, including U.S. News & World Report and the Daily Beast, use formulas that typically rank schools based how many students take Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes, and then score well on the related exams. Some of the formulas give schools credit for graduation rates and college-going rates. U.S. News' rankings this year were marred by reports of faulty data for two campuses in the Top 20. The problem stemmed from incorrect figures reported to the U.S. Department of Education's Common Core of Data, the federal database used by the publication to gather information about schools.
Winerip argues that these numerical compilations can't truly reflect how well a school is truly serving its