Newsweek: Bronxville Among Top 100 High Schools in U.S.

Bronxville High School last week was once again named one of the top public high schools in the country in Newsweek's high-profile annual rankings.

The school dropped to the 87th spot on the list, down from 65 in 2009. There are more than 27,000 public high schools in the U.S., but being placed in the top 100 has caused little celebration in Bronxville.

Newsweek's methodology in ranking the schools, which involves dividing the number of Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) tests taken in a given year by the number of graduating seniors, has repeatedly come under fire since the magazine published its first list in 1998.

In 2008 and 2009, administrators from a number of Westchester school districts including Bronxville, Chappaqua and Scarsdale, sent a letter to Newsweek criticizing the ranking system and asking to be left off the list in future years.

"Although some of our schools may seem to be the fortunate beneficiaries of your praise, we believe that all schools, communities -- and your readers -- are poorly served by persistent efforts to use simplistic measures to rate or rank schools; in this particular case a single statistic, the number of students who sit for A.P. or I.B. exams," the 2009 letter reads. 

It continues, "In reality, it is impossible to know which high schools are 'the best' in the nation. Determining educational quality is a matter of looking at many different factors including the academic achievements of students at all levels of aptitude, students' overall accomplishments, their subsequent performance in college or at work and the unique values and aspirations of their different communities."

In an e-mail interview with Patch, Newsweek Contributing Editor Jay Mathews acknowledged the shortcomings of the 'Challenge Index', as the ranking system is known, but defended its worth in gauging the extent to which schools challenge students and for its utility in starting a dialogue about educational issues.

"We cannot resist looking at ranked lists. It doesn't matter what it is - SUVs, ice-cream stores, football teams, fertilizer dispensers. We want to see who is on top and who is not," said Mathews, who first devised the ranking system for his 1998 book Class Struggle, which chronicles Mamaroneck High School's attempt to level the playing field for students from low-income families.

"So I rank to get attention, with the hope that people will argue about the list and, in the process, think about the issues it raises," Mathews added.

Despite the protest, Mathews said, Bronxville complied with Newsweek's request for this year's data. He noted that freedom of information laws require public schools to release such information and that even if they refuse - what he called "the passive agressive thing" - most top schools publish the data on their websites.

Bronxville Schools Superintendent David Quattrone and High School Principal Terence Barton did not return multiple calls seeking comment. Assistant Superintendent John  Kehoe declined to comment, deferring to Quattrone.

But Scarsdale Superintendent Michael McGill said that in his district, where AP classes have been phased out over the last three years in favor of more comprehensive college-level courses, officials are more concerned with actually challenging students than with competing within the framework of the Challenge Index.

"[Teachers] were finding that focusing on AP tests caused curriculums in many courses to become overly broad and therefore shallow," McGill said.

"They said they couldn't do their best job of helping students develop deep understanding of the academic subjects or of fostering the critical and creative thinking needed to solve complex problems."

But, Mathews said, AP and IB exams are the only criteria that can be compared objectively for schools all over the country.

"Teacher quality, extracurricular activities, and other important factors are too subjective for a ranked list. Participation in challenging courses and tests, on the other hand, can be counted, and the results expose a significant failing in most high schools; less than 6 percent of the public high schools in the United States qualify for the Newsweek list," he said.

In order to qualify, a school must attain a Challenge Index rating of 1, meaning the number of AP or IB tests taken equals or exceeds the number of graduating seniors.

Mathews further singled out SAT exam scores as a poor gauge of school quality because of their correlation with family income.

"The SAT to me is sort of the enemy, defining schools by the average incomes of the parents. The Challenge Index defines schools by how hard they are working to challenge kids, which makes more sense to me."

According to U.S. News and World Report, which gave Bronxville High an "honorable mention" in its own rankings that use a slightly different metric, 78.8 percent of Bronxville High School's graduating seniors took at least one AP exam this year.