US News released their 2013 Best High School Rankings on April 23. According to US News, these rankings “can help parents wade through the ever expanding options of public high schools” and are based off of data collected from over 21,000 public high schools throughout the nation.
Schools are evaluated on student performance on state tests (like the CSTs in California), how well schools address the needs of underprivileged and minority students, as well as on student performance on AP and IB exams.
Fountain Valley High School ranks 841 nationally and 175 within the state of California.
Despite the fact that US News claims to provide an objective and viable system for people to see how schools match up numerically, this system has been called out for dubious and unfair practices.
Many colleges such as Reed College in Oregon, and Sarah Lawrence College in New York have chosen to opt out of US News rankings, citing the unreliability of the numbers reported.
In the past, several colleges such as Claremont McKenna have been found guilty of manipulating their numbers in order to be ranked higher.
These scandals are not reserved to the college ranking game alone. Two Orange County elementary schools, Peters Elementary School in Garden Grove and Willmore Elementary in Westminster, did not receive API scores last year because over 5% of tests had been tampered by “adult irregularities.”
US News high school rankings have come under fire for ranking schools, such as Oxford Academy, that are entrance-test based, under the same criteria as other public schools that do not require high scores to be admitted.
One of the most talked of standards in the high school ranking system is the “college readiness index (CRI).” The CRI is calculated “based on the school’s AP or IB participation rate (the number of 12th-grade students students in the 2010-2011 academic year who took at least one AP or IB test before or during their senior year, divided by the number of 12th-graders) and how well the students did on those tests.” Schools with this quotient at or above 14.8 meet criteria for the US News “gold and silver medal” awards. A CRI score of 100.0 means that every senior at a particular high school took and passed at least one IB or AP exam before or during their senior year.
Fountain Valley High School has a CRI of 35.8, meeting the requirement for a Silver Medal.
Oxford Academy, by comparison, has a CRI of 99.6 and an overall national ranking of 16.
For schools, the benefits of having a higher rank are obvious. Schools that are closer to the top of the US News listings gain more prestige, funding, and recognition.
With these benefits in mind, some may find it advantageous to encourage more students to take AP exams as to increase the overall AP participation rate. This would, in theory, raise the school’s rank. Easing prerequisites for AP classes would allow for more students to take these exams.
However, others find that perpetuating this mindset will have deeply distressing consequences on AP teachers and students alike.
“[Prerequisites] allow teachers to maintain a high level of teaching,” said AP Biology teacher and Science department coordinator, Lehua Werdel. “If you’re not qualified, you’re going to cry all semester.”
“I think enrollment in AP classes is not a good indicator of the rigor of a school,” she stated.
With so many factors that can distort the various indexes and criteria by which US New uses to rank high schools, a proportion educators and students find that it has become absurd to accept these rankings as infailible truth and as a reason to change existing policy.
