I haven’t ranted about Jay Mathews’ writing in a while, in part because he’s no longer the primary education columnist for the Washington Post (fortunately, they chose Valerie Strauss to fill that role), but mostly because there’s really nothing new to discuss.
He loves the Advanced Placement program and is responsible for the “challenge” index, possibly the worst measure of high school quality ever created.1 What else is there to know about Mathews? He certainly doesn’t address many other education-related topics in his writing.
Anyway, his most recent column continues this AP romance by chastising a prominent local private school for not releasing to him data on how many students take Advanced Placement tests. So he can flatter them by including the numbers in the next round of the index scores, of course.
And that’s about it. Most of the piece is just Mathews complaining about not being able to include private schools like this one in his lame ranking of mostly public schools.
If he had only accepted the headmaster’s very rational justification for their policy, he would have had nothing to write about.
“We believe that parents and students are not helped by rating systems which purport to evaluate school quality based on test data,” Sidwell head of school Tom Farquhar told me. Independent Education, the local private school association, encourages all of its members to keep their numbers to themselves.
Good for them.
Two other minor points.
First, calling Sidwell Friends “our most famous private high school”2 because the president’s children and those of other politicians attend is a prime example of inside-the-beltway pretentiousness. In keeping with Quaker tradition, Sidwell likes to keep a low profile and I’m not sure they would consider themselves the most famous private school in the DC area, much less the whole US.
Second, the fact that his daughter graduated from Sidwell also lends a bias, and not a small dose of privileged attitude, to this column. In addition to letting us know that the Post must pay him very well since the school has always been one of the most expensive in a very pricy market.
Ok, I’ll now return to ignoring Jay Mathews.