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From Best of the Web Today: Yesterday, the 12th

Two Schools for the Price of One Yesterday's item on Tampa, Fla.'s Hillsborough High School--which got a "D" from the state but was rated the country's 10th best school by Newsweek--prompted several readers to write us with an explanation. Here's Skip Simpson:

As a former resident of Tampa and a graduate of a "blue ribbon" private school in the area I can tell you that the reason Hillsborough High is listed as the 10th best school in the country is because of their International Baccalaureate (IB) program. This IB program took many promising students from my private school after eighth grade by offering a similarly excellent education free.

In the IB program students are sheltered from the rest of the student population so that they may focus on their studies without being distracted by the dropouts and poor students that led the school to get a "D" in the first place.

It also turns out there's an explanation for why New York City's elite high schools didn't turn up in the list, given in an online Q&A with the authors:

New York, NY: Unless I missed them, I didn't see 1 NYC public school on the top 1,000 list. How could that be possible?

Barbara Kantrowitz and Jay Mathews: We are looking for schools that challenge average students as well as the most gifted and therefore we exclude schools that have strict academic admissions criteria. Some of the best and most famous high schools in New York City use a entrance exam for all students and therefore don't qualify for our list. That would include schools like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science or Hunter College High School--all of which would likely be at the top of our list if we did include them. There are other wonderful public high schools in New York; we mentioned a few of them in our story.

So it turns out these are the best 1,000 (actually 1,042) mediocre high schools in the country.

Says it far better than I...