Rating Schools-Time to Rethink?

Port Tampa's own Westshore elementary is an A rated school again this year. Congratulations to the students and faculty! Love or hate the FCAT you have to be happy when your neighborhood school does well.

Unfortunately I think the FCAT generated report cards, as well as some other measures of school quality, have left many parents with unwarranted satisfaction with their schools while other schools are not given enough credit. In yesterday's Class Struggle column , the Washington Post's regular education columnist, Jay Mathews, writes about critiques of the Challenge Index (which he invented) used in Newsweek's annual rating of the best American high schools. Some highly ranked Florida schools, including Hillsborough High School, are singled out by researchers from Education Sector an educational policy think tank:

"A successful high school should show high levels of student achievement, graduate almost all of its students and not let any demographic subgroup suffer at the expense of others," they say. "Most national and local experts and policymakers share these values. To be sure, graduation rates and student achievement are hardly the only indicators of a school's quality. At a minimum, however, America's best high schools should be expected to meet these basic criteria.

"Yet our analysis shows that many schools on Newsweek's list do not meet these minimum standards. Using publicly available student performance data, we found that many schools on Newsweek's 2005 ranking have glaring achievement gaps and high dropout rates. By presenting them as America's best, Newsweek is misleading readers and slighting other schools that may in fact be better than those on Mathews' list. For example, the magazine ranks Eastside High School in Gainesville, Fla., as the third best high school in the nation, but only 12 percent of Eastside's black students were reading at grade-level in 2004. And Newsweek ranks Hillsborough High School in Tampa, Fla., as America's 10th best high school, but only 17 percent of black students and 26 percent of Hispanic students met the state's modest grade-level standards in 2004. While some students at Eastside or Hillsborough may be receiving a challenging education, it's clear that many are not. And Eastside and Hillsborough are not outliers. In fact, schools with substantial inequities in student achievement make up a significant proportion of Newsweek's list of best high schools."

To read about some alternatives for rating schools take a look at Mathews' columns about Park City Utah's attempts to adopt criteria to rate the nation's top ten school districts.