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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Didn't see Sidwell, Maret, St. Albans, Landon, Georgetown Day, Georgetown Prep, Potomac in the top 50.[/quote]

Here's a quote from Jay Mathews explanation of the methodology used which applies to the two big 3 schools you listed. "The Challenge Index is designed to identify schools that have done the best job in persuading average students to take college-level courses and tests. It does not work with schools that have no, or almost no, average students." I believe he uses average SAT scores to determine which schools not to include.[/quote]

Different poster.  I've followed Mathews' Index for years now, and even quizzed him about how it works on the WaPo comments section.  Here's what he does ....

Mathews excludes selective [i]public[/i] schools from the AP-index list where their SAT average is higher than the highest "regular" public school SAT in his sample. I think his SAT cutoff is something like 1362 this year.  He says he excludes those high-SAT selective public schools because they do not have many average students, so the AP-index doesn't really mean much for them because the AP-index calculation is really aimed at challenging [i]average[/i] students.  But for some odd reason, Mathews leaves [i]private[/i] schools (at least those that will give him AP data) in the AP-index list, even if they are selective private schools with SAT averages far higher than his 1362 cutoff.  Mathews says he leaves these private schools on the AP-index list "so parents can compare" or something like that.  But that explanation doesn't make much sense in light of his explanation for why he's pulling selective [i]public [/i]schools off the list.

After having looked at his results for several years, and having traded messages with him, I think I know why he does it this way.  Mathew really cherishes the TJ magnet, and he really likes taking shots at private schools.  That's just a bias he carries as a reporter.  He's written countless articles extolling the virtues of TJ, and countless more articles criticizing private schools.  Mathews doesn't want TJ having a poor nationwide result on the AP-index list (which it would if he included TJ on the normal list), and he probably knows the TJ community would come after him with pitchforks if TJ fared poorly.  So Mathews created his "public elites" list to remove the selective public schools like TJ from the scoring model.  But Mathews also wants to crap on private schools, so he continues to list them "for comparison's sake" alongside the regular public schools, even though they do not fit into his self-professed methodology because they do not have enough average students.

I've challenged him to use the same SAT cutoff for both selective public and private schools, but he's refused.[/quote]

So Sidwell gets the highest USNWR ranking and the lowest Challenging Schools ranking and everyone is happy.[/quote]

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