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Advanced Placement for All

The simple-minded logic of Newsweek's high-school rankings.

Jun 6, 2005, Vol. 10, No. 36 • By DAVID SKINNER
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NEWSWEEK recently published its ranking of the nation's "100 Best" public high schools. Unlike, say, U.S. News & World Report's rankings of law schools, which can be read as a kind of Michelin Guide for aspiring lawyers, the Newsweek list offers no such concrete consumer service. It may feed the vanity of those already attending one of the top schools ("See if your high school made Newsweek's cut," the magazine advertises). But only about a third of American high school students choose to attend a high school other than their local one. And in any case, the relevant batch from which most parents pick is local, not national.

But what's really unique about Newsweek's list is that it's based on only one criterion: the proportion of students who, in a given high school, take--not pass, just show up for--any Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate test.

For a critic of this approach, one need look no further than the College Board itself, which designs and markets Advanced Placement courses and exams. On its website, it says that AP exams "should never be used as a sole measure for gauging educational excellence and equity," and calls media rankings that do so "problematic." Education experts are just as critical. Chester E. Finn Jr. of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation compares Newsweek's system to judging people's health only by taking their temperature. "You'd be overlooking their blood pressure" and every other indicator of physical well-being, says Finn. Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution is even more adamant: "Any ranking system worth anything at all must have at its core student learning. And this one does not."

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