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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]No one from my DCPS would even consider CHEC.  We have talked (the active parents) about junior high/high and when CHEC was mentioned no one considered it as an option. Even when the bilingual office tried to talk it up at one of our meeting.

So..you can make it the feeder school, but that does not mean that parents would stay in that track and send their kids to CHEC.[/quote]

Why not?  They're consistently ranked highly by the Post's Challenge Index, offer AP courses, have committed school leaders.  [/quote]

Proficiency in English and Math hover in the low 50s to high 40s. Does it matter how many AP classes are offered? Clearly some of the fundamentals still needs to be addressed.

The Challenge Index is flawed and pretty much useless. Many argue that the entire AP process is losing credibility while losing actual college credit at top schools. It's horribly unfair to students to lead them to believe that because they took one AP class (CHEC only requires English) that they are actually prepared for a selective 4 year college. This can be especially damaging for students who are the first generation in their families to attend college. CHEC's website flaunts the amount of college scholarships it's students receive. But it doesn't seem to say anything about it's college graduation rates.

This is one of the many critiques of the Index. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/why-high-school-rankings-are-meaningless-and-harmful/276122/

Excerpt -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]

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