Reply to 2016 Wash Post Challenge Index Rankings are Out

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Reply to "2016 Wash Post Challenge Index Rankings are Out"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Most people (parents) erroneously think that the Challenge Index is some sort of school achievement measurement.  It is not meant to be that and there are plenty of other, better tools for that task.

[b]Matthews has been pretty explicit about his goal, which is to encourage districts to offer their richer, more challenging curriculum to a broader base of students beside just the elite students.[/b]

[/quote]

If that's the case, then he shouldn't be including WIS, NCS, etc., in the rankings. By any definition, those populations will consist almost entirely of "elite students," or at least students who have had an "elite education."

I have a child at one of those and agree that simply counting the number of kids who take an AP or IB test is not an accurate measure of a school's worth.[/quote]

It at least contextualizes the public offerings. WIS, NCS are in there to compare to TJ, McLean, Whitman etc.

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Different poster.  Matthews actually pulls TJ and other magnets out of the list, saying it's because schools like TJ aren't aimed at average students, as evidenced by their high SAT scores.  But he leaves in the private schools with similarly high SAT scores, which doesn't make a lot of sense on its face.

Personally, I think he's got three competing goals, which leads to how he does things:

(1) Compare average populations on how many students challenge themselves by taking AP exams.  This is why he creates the list.  Makes sense to me.  Not the best methodology, but I guess it's one.

(2) Protect TJ.  Matthews simply loves TJ.  He doesn't want to leave it in the mix because it gets beaten by several other school.  Also, it highlights the weakness of his methodology because he has to explain why schools with weaker track records than TJ score better.  So to avoid these problems, he pulls TJ and other magnet schools out of the list and "recognizes" them separately on his "elite schools" list.

(3) Take a potshot at private schools.  Matthews doesn't like private schools, and rarely misses an opportunity to knock them.  I suspect he'll even come out with a column in the next few days where he points out that many expensive private schools don't do so well on his challenge index.  He'll suggest parents aren't getting their money's worth, and also will criticize the private schools for withholding the data he uses to include them in his rankings.  I consider this silly because many of those private schools have SAT averages just as high as the magnet schools he pulls off his list, and the private schools kids are just as non-representative.  But Matthews leaves them in the rankings for the same reason he pulls TJ off - he wants to protect TJ from competition, but wants to put the private schools in competition.

[/quote]

Oh Jay, you're so predictable. Here's the private school potshot article I predicted in item #3

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/why-keeping-secrets-is-not-in-a-schools-best-interest/2016/04/24/82cc07c4-07f5-11e6-b283-e79d81c63c1b_story.html[/quote]

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