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There is no end to the number of education rankings. The Washington Post adds to the ever-growing list by contributing a ranking of America’s Most Challenging Public High Schools. Challenging is simply defined. It’s the number of advanced placement tests divided by the number of seniors who graduate. A ratio of at least 1.000 means a school had as many test-takers as graduates. The higher the number; the better. What’s different about this list is that at seeks identify schools that have done a good job of taking average students and convincing them to take college-level courses and tests. Schools that traditionally have done well because they have large concentrations of top students will not fare well under this index. The Challenge index is an approximate indicator of how well schools have helped students academically.
The index also notes the percentage of students who come from families that qualify for lunch subsidies and the percentage of students who pass at least one college-level test.
American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, California garnered the honor as the most challenging school in the nation. The school had a Challenge Ratio of 23.571
How did North Carolina schools do? The top five North Carolina schools with challenge ratios are as follows:
Penn-Griffin School for the Arts, High Point 6.962 (44th)
Raleigh Charter School, Raleigh – 5.568 (85th)
Thomas Jefferson Classical Academy, Mooresboro – 4.818 (139th)
Woods Charter School, Chapel Hill – 4.306 (198th)
Grimsley High School, Greensboro -4.093 216th
Can’t help but notice three of the top five NC schools are charter schools. Congrats to all teachers, students and staff.
My kids go to a Charter school and it is great. I tried to get them into Raleigh Charter but the lottery was unkind. Raleigh Charter is a great school full of motivated smart kids. Raleigh Charter cherry picks the best and brightest by structuring the lottery around freshman year math class where most of the seats are for Geometry or Algebra 2. In the pre-lottery open house they also spend most of the time talking about how rigorous the curriculum is and how students will not do well if they are not AP-level. To be clear, I will try to get my last kid in there too.
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Can’t help but notice that charter schools do not have to deal with the challenges that the public schools have to deal with. They generally provide no transportation, free lunch or special needs assistance. This leads to the selection of the top students as the ones with challenges are de facto excluded. Anyone with the ability to follow logic and reason could determine that given these factors this is an apples to oranges comparison. A Ferrari will beat a VW Beetle in every fair race. This is to be expected from surface level analysis performed by those that have an agenda such as the writers of this site. I suspect a high school student at one of those public schools you so malign could more than likely perform more in depth analysis and generate a more accurate report. Then again accuracy or facts would be counterproductive to the ideology this weak article is quite embarrassingly attempting to support. For those who are familiar with the scientific method I want to contrast it with the Civitas method. It only has two steps.
1. Jump to a conclusion.
2. Cherry pick and misrepresent data to prove said conclusion.
It seems much more efficient but it would be the difference of landing a man on the moon and ending in a ball of fire on the launch pad. I think I will stick with the scientific method.
Jlp,
As a chemist, I assure you that I understand the scientific method. I think you are venting your frustration in the wrong way. This article just seems to be showing the results from another source’s research. The article even mentions other sources for you to do your own research…
So what’s the issue?