Reply to Marshall "3rd for Best School"

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "Marshall "3rd for Best School""

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]Atlantic Monthly article explains why ranking high schools is meaningless and harmful:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/why-high-school-rankings-are-meaningless-and-harmful/276122/

1.  The inherent impossibility of measuring relative quality in schools. Quality is a very subjective matter, especially in something as intangible as education. And using a simple measure to rank thousands of schools certainly cannot capture the relative quality of schools or indicate which are better than others.

2.  Focusing only on AP and other "advanced" courses is silly. Aside from the obvious and already noted objection that looking only at such courses fails to take into account all the other indicators of school quality, some people (I include myself here) say that many of these courses simply aren't all they're cracked up to be, which makes their use as a proxy for quality even more ludicrous.

3.  The Challenge Index has been partly responsible for fueling the tremendous growth in AP enrollments around the country over the past ten years. Of course, many students take AP courses because they're genuinely interested in challenging themselves with what can be a rigorous course of study and because they're intellectually curious about the subject matter. Unfortunately, too many others take these courses because they're feverishly trying to impress college admissions officers by stacking their record with large numbers of AP courses.

But many students who end up in AP courses are there because they are unwitting pawns of their principals, local school boards, or education bureaucrats, who are pushing more students to take AP classes to improve their schools' ranking on the Challenge Index and other such lists. Remember that the Mathews index doesn't take into account how students perform on the AP exams, just that they take them. The incentive to vacuum kids into these classes ends up packing AP courses with too many students who don't belong there.

In short, by being partly responsible for the explosive growth in AP enrollment over the past decade, the Mathews ranking -- and, to a lesser extent, the others -- amplifies the absurdity that pervades contemporary public education in the United States, where cramming students' heads with information and then subjecting those students to standardized tests seems to have supplanted helping students to learn as the preferred modus operandi of many education officials, and where the behavior of school officials is shaped more by perverse incentives than by educational common sense.

That's the reason to care about this.

If it weren't for the fact that these sorts of rankings actually shape school behavior, everyone would be perfectly justified in ignoring Mathews and the Washington Post as they spend time and other resources assembling his list. The ranking itself is meaningless. But the harm it and other lists of its kind do to public education and the role they play in driving the College Board's revenues can't be overlooked. These lists may sell papers and draw readers to websites, but for those of us outside of that business, we've a duty to push back against this kind of reductionism wherever we see it.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics