Posted on 06/17/2007 10:06:06 AM PDT by Smartaleck
The Washington Post Challenge Index measures a public high school's effort to challenge its students....
(Excerpt) Read more at projects.washingtonpost.com ...
We lost faith in public schools a long time ago. The list is pretty much irrelevant to me.
But comments are not...
The list also eliminates the extraordinary public schools that have an admissions exam, like Stuyvesant in NYC and Jefferson in VA
ever look at the high school biology books in deatil ?
still teaches that at conception the widdle baby has lungs AND GILLS
that lie started in the late 1880’s to slide in evolution
WTH? Why is THAT important???
“The list is pretty much irrelevant to me.”
Ironically, so is your comment.
“Subsidized Lunches”
It’s somewhat an indication of the number of students from low income families. Thus, in spite of “these people” the school excels.
Interpreted another way, money is not always the solution!
To challenge the claim that the schools rank high because they do not have any poor students.
It is interesting that in the two cities where I know a little about the schools, there are schools listed that I would not expect to be on the list and there are not schools there that I would expect to be. But I homeschool, so it is not relevant for us either.
Troy HS, Fullerton CA is a public school. It consistently ranks very highly.
The ethnic composition of the student body is:
39.8% Asian
29.4% Caucasian
13% Hispanic
4.3% Filipino
0.6% African American
12.9% Other (Native American, Pacific Islander, Multiracial).
Source: California Department of Education, Educational Demographics Unit
At least here in California, if you want the best school situation for your child, find where the Asians live and learn. I have heard many Asian families move to areas with schools which do well, further improving the school.
Asian families it appears believe in education.
Thanks. Makes sense now. :)
This list is a joke.
ping
My daughter is in the magnet gifted program at a local grade school - her three best friends in the class are all Asian girls.
I found it hard to believe that even one school is LAUSD (Los Angeles) could be in the top 100 so I checked it out:
Year Rank Index Equity and Excellence Subsidized Lunches
2007 46 4.249 60.1 59.6
2006 46 3.964 69.0 34.0
2005 28 3.892 37.0
The “equity and excellence” dropped by 10 percent from 2006 to 2007, but they did manage to find nearly twice as many families to sponge hot lunch off the tax payers. That sounds about right.
This whole list is irrelevant. They’re not even looking at scores on standardized tests. All they’re looking at is:
1) what percentage of students take AP classes/exams
2) divided by how many people are in a class
3) and then looking at how poor they are.
In other words, just how much a school challenges its students to take advanced course work.
Taking advanced level coursework is good, but so is one’s performance, which is not even examined here. So they’re not really stressing results here, just effort—if coerced effort.
Who annointed the Washington Post the arbiter of excellence in education? Methinks the highly rated schools are just the ones which happen to comply with the approved social engineering standards bandied about around the water cooler at the newspaper one day when there was no actual news to distort.
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