Posts Tagged → high school

A Very Narrow Definition of Challenging

Not long ago the headline in the Washington Post (and in their now-defunct publication Newsweek) would claim to provide the ranking of America’s best high schools. These days their list presents merely the “most challenging”.

Other than the slightly altered verbiage, nothing has changed in fifteen years. This is the Post Company’s annual attempt to define school quality in the most simplistic, meaningless way possible using a system created by their education writer emeritus, Jay Mathews.

For those who have missed the annual ritual, here’s how the “challenge” index works:

We take the total number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Advanced International Certificate of Education tests given at a school each year and divide by the number of seniors who graduated in May or June.

That’s it. Nothing about how well students actually scored on those tests. Or of how they may have been academically or intellectually challenged at their schools in other ways, using assessments other than standardized tests.

The list completely excludes very challenging schools like the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia which is entirely project-based, assessing student learning without these “higher level” standardized tests at all.

As I’ve ranted in this space in previous years, there’s nothing wrong with compiling lists based on arbitrary criteria, and I doubt many would even notice if the Post called this a ranking of the schools most oriented to pushing test-driven college prep programs.

But listing schools only based on their abilities to herd students into particular testing programs is a very narrow, superficial way to define an educational challenge.

In Need of Alternative Diagnoses

It’s hard to exaggerate just how scary this is:

Nearly one in five high school age boys in the United States and 11 percent of school-age children over all have received a medical diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to new data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That’s a 53% increase in the past decade and around “two-thirds of those with a current diagnosis receive prescriptions for stimulants like Ritalin or Adderall”, drugs that can cause more problems than they solve.

And the situation is probably going to get worse.

And even more teenagers are likely to be prescribed medication in the near future because the American Psychiatric Association plans to change the definition of A.D.H.D. to allow more people to receive the diagnosis and treatment. A.D.H.D. is described by most experts as resulting from abnormal chemical levels in the brain that impair a person’s impulse control and attention skills.

But what if the doctors are not always right?

“There’s a tremendous push where if the kid’s behavior is thought to be quote-unquote abnormal – if they’re not sitting quietly at their desk – that’s pathological, instead of just childhood,” said Dr. Jerome Groopman, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the author of “How Doctors Think.”

What if those kids diagnosed with this condition are simply bored and in need of alternative paths to their learning? Are “repeatedly losing one’s cellphone or losing focus during paperwork” really symptoms of a medical condition?

Does the fact that I have problems with paperwork and hate sitting still for meetings mean I’ll be getting a prescription? 

Words Are Far More Important Than Word

BYOD rolls on here in the overly-large school district. Now in our second year, the progress is not as fast as the very-impatient me would like but at least the direction is forward, so I remain optimistic.

While our middle schools and even some elementary schools are doing some great work with integrating student devices, many of the high schools are doing a lot of foot dragging. A recent short discussion with an assistant principal revealed one reason why.

When I asked about BYOD at his school he told me they really hadn’t done much about it. Following up on the why, he gave me some of the usual discipline, “we have no control over what the kids might do” excuses, and I pushed back on all of them.

Then he told me that, aside from all that, students probably wouldn’t come with the right software on their devices making them useless for instruction.

“Right” software?

Yeah, like Word and PowerPoint. “They really can’t get anything done in their classes without those programs.”

I wish I understood the reverence felt towards the Microsoft Office package. Most people know don’t use more than 20% of the capabilities of Word, maybe a little more in PowerPoint, less in Excel, and I can’t name anyone who willingly opens Access.

Anyway, I didn’t have time to explain the error of his approach, one that I expect is pretty common.

However, what this AP and other educators need to realize is that it’s far more important to define what it is we want students to be able to do with their devices rather than to think in terms of brand names.

When it comes to BYOD, kids should be able to use their devices for writing, accessing and reading information, taking and editing images, and moving their work somewhere. The exact software that gets the job done is irrelevant.

I know many teachers are nervous about this lack of consistency and loss of control in their classrooms. Get over it.

Let your students be responsible for the technology and concentrate instead on what you want them to learn from and do with those devices. As should always be the case, the learning is far more important than the device.

But Don’t Blame The Index

Ok, I know I said I would quit my largely fruitless ranting about Post education columnist Jay Mathews’ “challenge” index but there’s too much irony in his latest defense of the list to let it pass.

In his blog Mathews responds to an email received from a local parent who is concerned about his child attending a local high school because of it’s low ranking in the index. Mathews starts by admitting “it was my fault” for the parent getting the wrong impression of the school, saying that it has “terrific teachers”.

But that contrition doesn’t last long as he quickly moves on to declare that the problem is not with the index. No way.

The school ranks low on his list because there are so many “challenging” high schools in our area. This particular one just looks bad by comparison to all the others. Not unlike a six year old Mercedes sitting next to a brand new luxury sedan*.

Mathews goes on to devote many more more words of praise for the school and in the process, completely misses the point, not to mention a heavy dose of irony in his justification.

As I and many others have pointed out, judging a high school by one, narrow, extremely simplistic criteria, one based only on how many students take a particular test, is wrong, misleading, and intellectually dishonest.

However, year after year, he and his high profile publisher (the Washington Post Company and their news syndicate) continue to promote this “challenge” index as a valid ranking of high school quality, one superior to all others. And year after year parents, students, school administrators, and the general public, fed by other media companies who reprint the list unquestioned, continue to believe it.

So, yes Jay, you are very much to blame for the confusion your correspondent has about the quality of the high school his child will be attending.

You should also take responsibility for misleading many other people when it comes to the many factors that contribute to a quality high school education, and that have nothing to do with AP.

* His analogy, not mine!

Digging Into The Numbers

How can a parent judge if one high school is better than another?  According to a New York Times article from this weekend, there are a “daunting” number of high profile rankings of the best US high schools published this time of year to help them make that determination.

As a public service to aid “anxious consumers”, the writer sets about to analyze one of those lists in order to understand how anyone could “quantify something as complex and nuanced as a high-quality education”.

Sorry, “challenge” index fans. He chose the one from Newsweek.

The writer does a great job of picking apart their system and it’s worth reading the whole thing.

But for this rant, let’s just cut to the bottom line. Where are the best schools?

Want the best high schools for your child? Move to Texas or Florida. Texas has 15 of the 100 best, placing second over all nationwide, while Florida has 10, the fourth most.

Read that again: 25% of the 100 best high schools in the country are in Texas and Florida.

This is no doubt due in good part to the reform efforts of George W. and Jeb Bush, who – like Newsweek – have made standardized test results a true measure of academic excellence.

That would be my guess.

At all costs, avoid Scarsdale, N.Y. It didn’t even make the top 1,000. Though its average SAT score of 1935 would rank it 21st among the 100 best, the school does not offer A.P. courses, and Newsweek counts A.P. data as 40 percent of the rating.

No AP courses??? I know someone who would consider that child abuse.

However, forget about the quality of Newsweek’s selection process. There’s another, far more important bottom line to consider in their decision to publish a Best American High School list (not to mention the Post’s multiple annual floggings of the “challenge”).

Given that magazines and newspapers are bleeding to death, this is the only plausible justification I can think of: Lists are cash cows.

End of story.