Newsweek Magazine rated Manhasset HS number 12 on their list
of the top 100 high schools in the country in 2003.
NEWSWEEK
*The 100 Best High Schools in America
The surge in the number of students taking AP tests is
changing life inside America’s classrooms—and altering the rules of
the college-admissions game. A look at a new set of winners for 2003.
By Jay Mathews
June 2 issue — In the
1970s, Mike Riley was a young Chicago teacher trying to save failing
inner-city students. He found they blossomed if he simply sat them down
each day after class and made sure they did their homework. “They went
from F’s to honor roll, and I realized that... they weren’t dumb
kids, just kids we hadn’t connected to,” he says. Riley learned that
even the most apathetic students responded to a challenge—as long as
they had the right support.
TODAY HE IS
THE superintendent of schools in Bellevue, Wash., a hilly and
ethnically diverse Seattle suburb on the leading edge of a movement to
take this lesson to the next level. Riley wants to make the hardest
classes in U.S. high schools today—the college-level Advanced
Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) courses—mandatory
for nearly all graduates. If he succeeds, he will help accelerate a
transformation of American secondary education that has sparked intense
debate among educators.
This month more than a
million students in 14,000 high schools took 1,750,000 AP exams, a 10
percent increase over last year and twice the number of these
college-level tests taken in 1996. That means that 245 more schools are
eligible for the 2003 Challenge Index, which ranks 739 public schools
according to the ratio of AP or IB tests taken by all students divided
by the number of graduating seniors. Schools that select more than half
their students by exams or other academic criteria are not eligible,
because they have few, if any, of the average students who need a boost
from AP or IB. Some of these magnet schools achieve extraordinary
results, partly because they get the best students. In the last index,
in 2000, only 494 schools were included. (AP’s younger, European-based
counterpart, IB, is also on the rise, with 77,285 tests given in
American schools this month.) The index uses AP and IB as a measure
because schools that push these tests are most likely to stretch young
minds—which should be the fundamental purpose of education.
Some experts think AP
is growing so fast and spreading so far it could eventually supplant the
SAT and the ACT as America’s most influential test. At Harvard—the
dream school for many high-performing seniors—the dean of admissions
says AP is already a better predictor of college grades than the SAT.
One reason could be that students get only one shot at the AP, unlike
the SATs, which many retake several times in order to boost their
scores. More important, AP tests a whole year of learning, while the SAT
assesses a specific set of skills that many educators think have little
relation to academic potential in college. College-admissions officers
at many schools say that AP and IB have acquired the status of backstage
passes at a rock concert. Selective universities begin to ask questions
if they see that applicants have not taken the tests available at their
high schools. Even freshmen and sophomores are crowding into AP courses
once open only to juniors and seniors. At Miller Place High School on
New York’s Long Island, guidance director Joseph W. Connolly says 40
percent of this year’s 10th graders took AP European history—an
unheard-of proportion a decade ago.
Both AP and IB students
answer lengthy free-response questions that are graded by actual human
beings (AP also has multiple-choice questions). If their scores are high
enough, students can earn college credit. They also get a taste of the
higher-level exams they’ll face on campus. Jordan Wish, a senior at
Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Md., took two AP and four
IB tests this month—25 hours of tests with not much time for sleep
each night. “Right now I am not feeling so good,” Wish said as he
crammed in some last-minute studying for the difficult AP physics test.
But he thinks the extra effort will be good preparation for Princeton,
where he’ll be a freshman this fall.
Proponents say AP and IB have
exposed many average suburban teenagers to a level of instruction once
reserved only for honor students and, even more significantly, have
energized inner-city schools. From 1998 to 2002, AP participation by
underrepresented minority students increased 77 percent and
participation by low-income students increased 101 percent, while
overall participation rose only 48 percent. But some administrators and
university educators warn that pushing the programs too far and too
quickly could dilute their benefits. A recent report by the National
Research Council says AP and IB courses should delve more deeply into
fewer topics. A few colleges have become more demanding as well. Last
year Harvard announced that it would give advanced standing only to
students who had the top AP grade, a 5, the equivalent of a college A,
on four required AP tests. There are complaints that many of the new
AP—students are failing the tests. And some high-school principals say
that it is better for their more-ambitious students to take courses at
local colleges rather than enroll in AP or IB. “There are many of us
who would celebrate the exit of AP from high-school life,” says
Marilyn Colyar, assistant principal at San Marino High School in
California. “I certainly believe in a rigorous curriculum for all
students,” she says, “but “a class can be challenging and
relevant, AP or not.”
The controversy over AP has become
particularly intense in the private schools and affluent public schools
that were the first to adopt the program in 1956, when it was little
more than a way to keep high-performing seniors from getting bored.
Andrew Meyers, head of the history department at the Ethical Culture
Fieldston School in New York City, says he was not sympathetic three
years ago when a student complained about being forced to stay on the AP
superhighway without stopping to explore some intriguing side roads. But
then, Meyers says, he realized that when-ever a student in his AP
American-history course asked a thoughtful question not quite on the
topic, he often heard himself saying, “That’s interesting... but we
have to move on to the next era.” Fieldston, Dalton, Exeter and a few
other private schools have declared themselves AP-free zones. Instead of
the AP history course he used to teach each spring, Meyers is offering
one of his favorite electives, “Inventing Gotham,” during which each
student devises a historical tour of New York City. Similar electives
are being offered at other schools shedding the AP label, although many
of their students still take AP tests in order to impress colleges.
Many advocates of
college-level courses say the prep schools are guilty of an elitist
reaction to programs that are helping more and more average and
below-average schools, as if AP and IB were last year’s high fashions
that
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had to be thrown out because similar clothes were being sold at
Kmart. At the average high school, “the —kids would not get into
elite colleges if they did not have AP courses,” says Nicholas Lemann,
author of “The Big Test,” a history of the SAT, “but Fieldston
knows that for socioeconomic reasons, their kids do not need AP to
persuade those colleges to take them.” Lemann and others fear that the
rarefied complaints of privileged schools could slow the spread of AP
and IB to poor districts where students need the challenge. Some teachers have accused the
College Board, which sponsors the AP, of promoting the program in order
to collect the $80 test fees from all those students eager for an
advantage in the college-admissions race. (IB is even more expensive,
but schools usually pay the test fees.) Educators also bicker over the
growing use of AP as a measure of school quality. NEWSWEEK’s list of
top high schools has been compared to U.S. News & World Report’s
annual “America’s Best Colleges” list by educators who say such
rankings distort the strengths of individual schools. The National
Research Council report complained that the NEWSWEEK list had “taken
on a life of its own,” with high schools publishing their ratings and
schools not making the list posting “disclaimers on their Web sites
indicating why they are not there.”
Despite this
criticism, the majority of educators say they continue to support the
growth of AP and IB. A recent straw-poll survey by the American School
Board Journal found that 80 percent of readers wanted more of their
students to take the college-level courses. And initial opposition often
disappears if schools provide extra help for students who need it. Pat
Hyland, principal of Mountain View (Calif.) High School, says she heard
many worries when she opened her AP courses to all, but they soon faded
away. “We have added tutorial sessions and a variety of other measures
to bolster the kids,” she says.
Many communities have found
that adding AP really turns a school around. Seven years ago, when Tim
Berkey became principal of Perry High School in a rural area east of
Cleveland, there were no AP or IB classes at all. He told teachers about
the marked change in student attitude and achievement he had seen at his
previous school, Adlai Stevenson in suburban Chicago, when the AP
program was opened to everyone willing to work that hard. Five years ago
Perry High started with 87 AP tests; this month it administered 214.
“We believed in kids, held high expectations, provided them with the
resources, tools and challenging opportunities, and then simply got out
of their way,” Berkey says.
Lemann, who thinks the SAT
hinders educational improvement, says AP and IB have had the opposite
effect—much to the surprise of many educators who are generally
opposed to the spread of standardized tests. “It has become a
wonderful and effective way to produce a massive upgrading of the high-
school curriculum,” Lemann says. “These were unintended
consequences, but good unintended consequences.”
The commitment to giving more
high schoolers a useful dose of college exam-week trauma has turned an
old elementary-school building in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., into an IB
hothouse—and the top school on the 2003 NEWSWEEK list. Five hundred
teenagers, picked by lottery from 13 local districts, have enrolled in
the International Academy, while their neighborhood friends shy away
from the workload. “I had no idea what I was getting myself into,”
says Bhavana Bhaya, a senior who took 30 hours of IB exams this month at
the public school near Detroit, “but I am glad I am here.” The
effort paid off, says senior James Kurecka. He was afraid his 1270 SAT
score and 27 ACT score would not have been enough to get into the
University of Michigan’s prestigious College of Engineering; he
believes the IB label did the trick.
Even students whose grades
and test scores in high school were mediocre are more likely to graduate
from college if they have had some challenging high-school —courses
such as AP and IB, according to a 1999 study by U.S. Education
Department researcher Clifford Adelman. That finding was particularly
true for minorities. The Science Academy of South Texas, a public school
that draws students from three rural counties in the Rio Grande Valley,
has sent several migrant workers’ children to high-tech colleges by
exposing them to difficult AP assignments. Norma Flores, a senior, says
she often started school late in the fall because her migrant-laborer
family needed her in the cornfields. “I had to work twice as hard to
catch up,” she says. But next fall, fortified by college-level
courses, she will study aerospace engineering at the University of
Texas-Pan American campus in Edinburg.
Riley, the superintendent in
Bellevue, says the criticism of AP and IB demonstrates how ubiquitous
these programs have become, and how many previously ignored students are
being helped. “Elitists will always try to find higher ground when it
becomes apparent that others can scale their hill,” he says. “While
AP’s standards, tests and curriculum have not changed, there are those
who once thought the program was the gold standard but now see it as
tarnished. What’s the only, and I underscore only, thing that has
changed? More kids are included.” And like his students in Chicago
nearly 30 years ago, he’s betting that they will all thrive.
The Top High Schools
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A Web-exclusive extended list of the nation’s top high schools
Public schools are ranked according to a ratio called the Challenge
Index devised by Jay Mathews: the number of Advanced Placement or
International Baccalaureate tests taken by all students at a school in
2002 divided by the number of graduating seniors. Schools that chose
more than half of their students by grades or test scores were not
considered because the index is designed to identify schools that
challenge average students and does not work well with schools that have
few or no average students. The schools ranked below have the strongest
AP or IB programs in the country. Each of them is in the top four
percent of all American high schools measured this way. If you know of a
public school that belongs on the list, with at least as many AP or IB
tests as graduates in 2002, contact Jay Mathews at mathewsj@washpost.com.
* gives International Baccalaureate
tests
—Expanded list based on
additional school data received by 6/6/2003.
—Using Ctrl-F on your keyboard
allows you to search the list
Rank / School Name / City / State /
Score
1 . International Academy* | Bloomfield Hills | Mich. | 6.323
2 . Stanton College Prep* | Jacksonville | Fla. | 5.639
3 . Paxon* | Jacksonville | Fla. | 4.668
4 . Alabama School of Fine Arts | Birmingham | Ala. | 4.567
5 . Jericho | Jericho | N.Y. | 4.519
6 . George Mason* | Falls Church | Va. | 4.365
7 . Eastern Sierra Academy | Bridgeport | Calif. 4.250
8 . Myers Park* | Charlotte | N.C. | 4.086
9 . Science Academy of South Texas | Mercedes | Tex. | 4.024
10 . H-B Woodlawn | Arlington | Va. | 3.961
11 . Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies | Los Angeles | Calif. | 3.893
12 . Manhasset | Manhasset | N.Y. | 3.840
13 . Wyoming | Cincinnati | Ohio | 3.782
14 . Bellevue | Bellevue | Wash. | 3.755
15 . Highland Park | Dallas | Tex. | 3.693
16 . Edgemont | Scarsdale | N.Y | 3.673
17 . International | Bellevue | Wash. | 3.643
18 . Great Neck South | Great Neck | N.Y. | 3.640
19 . Newport Bellevue | Bellevue | Wash. | 3.625
20 . Cold Spring Harbor | Cold Spring Harbor | N.Y. | 3.573
21 . Mills University Studies | Little Rock | Ark. | 3.564
22 . Lincoln Park Academy* | Fort Pierce | Fla. | 3.521
23 . W.T. Woodson* | Fairfax | Va. | 3.448
24 . Yorktown | Arlington | Va. | 3.422
25 . St. Petersburg* | St. Petersburg | Fla. | 3.403
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