Penncrest Makes WaPo's Top High Schools List

The Washington Post released its annual national public high school rankings earlier this month, and was among those that made the cut. The recognition putatively places Penncrest in the top seven percent of the roughly 27,000 public high schools in the country.

According to its architect, Post education writer Jay Mathews, the aim of The High School Challenge is to gauge how effectively a school prepares its students for college.

Penncrest ranked 18 in Pennsylvania and 1,375 nationally by this measure.

"What we've done, is we've encouraged kids to take more rigorous classes, and we've opened the doors for more kids to take Advanced Placement classes," said Penncrest principal Richard Gregg, whose school made the list for the third-straight year. "We always strive to get more of our students to challenge themselves academically."

The release of such rankings is usually met with controversy over the results, methodology, and even the worthiness of the exercise itself. The Post's have been no exception.

Their metric, the "Challenge Index," is arrived at by adding the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Advanced International Certificate of Education tests taken by the student body of a given school and dividing it by the size of its graduating class. Critics have called the ranking reductive on the grounds that it doesn't account for how the students actually performed on the tests.

The exclusion of test results isn't necessarily a problem though, says Villanova University assistant professor of Education and Counseling Jerusha Conner. Conner said that while she remains unconvinced of the value of school rankings, she thinks the Post's are among the best of a flawed bunch.

"I actually think it's a really innovative way to measure successful schools, because it accounts for access to a high-quality, rigorous curriculum," Conner said.

Conner added that while many of the standardized tests prescribed by No Child Left Behind are rote, the Advanced Placement tests are sufficiently challenging that simply exposing students to them confers benefits.

"There is a lot of research that bears out that students will rise to meet higher expectations," Conner said.

Conner's colleague in the Villanova Education Department, Professor Richard Jacobs, argues that high school rankings, methodology aside, are inadequate to an impossible task. He says that a high school is simply too complex a system to capture in a single figure, and that attempts to do so, often bring about more harm than good.

"My opinion would be that the rankings verge on being meaningless in any scientific sense," Jacobs said. "They are, however, very meaningful for superintendents, politicians, parents, teachers, or anyone trying to advance an ideology."

Conner said that if she were tasked with structuring an alternate ranking system—a task she added she would likely refuse—she would focus on more subjective, but meaningful, measures of student engagement.

"I would look to the students and ask them what they think makes for quality education. My guess is their answers would include things like 'I feel like I'm learning, I feel like I'm being challenged, and I have the resources to learn what I'm being taught,'" Conner said.

Among area schools also ranked were Radnor High School, which placed 19 in the state and 1,441 in the nation, Lower Merion High School, which ranked 17 and 1,333, and Harriton High School, which finished ninth and 940.

"Our kids work really hard, they behave well, and they're a joy to be around everyday. We treat them well, and they in turn treat us well," said Radnor principal Mark Schellenger.

Schellenger added that while he was pleased with the recognition, he is proud of his school for "things that don't necessarily show up in these rankings."

"I really want the emphasis for our kids to be entry into adulthood, not necessarily admission into college or what sort of courses they took," he said.

LMSD communications director Doug Young said his district—which includes both Harriton and Lower Merion high schools—was pleased with the recognition, but emphasized, like Schellenger, that such honors are not the objective of their curriculum.

"Both schools do a great job of challenging our students and giving them opportunities to be successful," said Young, who added that many effective schools were left off the list. "Both schools do a great job preparing kids for college, and if that means recognition and rankings, that's great, but those rankings aren't what we strive for."