In his Class Struggle column today, Jay Mathews is promoting Newsweek’s annual ranking of “best” high schools and also attempts to defend his “challenge” index that was used to compile the bogus list.

Many people prefer rating schools by average test scores, but I consider that a measure of the student family incomes, not the quality of the schools,…

So, instead of using one narrow, inadequate measure of school quality, use mine.

… I get many messages from principals, teachers and parents who like this way of assessing schools.

My index is popular so the results must be valid.

The list gets about 7 million page views a year.

And we all know popularity on the web equals quality information.

An extremely weak defense for this simplistic, misleading system.