Boulder High Breaks Top 200

By Amy Brouillette, 5-23-07

Mysterious masked teens prompting a recent SWAT team sweep aside, Boulder High School is among the top 200 Best Public High Schools in the nation, according to this year’s Challenge Index published in Newsweek. Boulder High is second-best public high school in Colorado according to the annual report, landing at 168th of the nation’s 1,200 schools evaluated; JeffCo’s Lakewood High School edged out Boulder, as it has the past two years, coming in at 146th. In all, 23 Colorado public high schools made this year’s top 1200 list, three of which hail from the Boulder Valley School District (Boulder at 168; Fairview High School at 242; Monarch High School at 632). For Boulder High, this year’s marks the first time it has broken the top-200 mark. (This year, Colorado also carries the distinct honor of coming in last: Bear Creek High School in Lakewood secured the number 1200 spot on the national list.)

Devised a decade ago by Washington Post journalist Jay Matthews, the Challenge Index ranks public high schools according to a ratio of the number of Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB) and/or Cambridge tests taken by all students at a school in 2006 divided by the number of graduating seniors. The ranking does not reflect actual AP or IP test scores, but rather the quantity of students tested. As Matthews reasons, AP scores are often kept artificially high by allowing only top students to take the courses. Matthews writes: “Just taking the course and the test mattered more than the score because even struggling AP students learned a great deal.” An index-driven Wall Street reporter turned education columnist, Matthews decided to devise an index-based system to determine “which schools were giving their students the most value. This would help me show why Garfield, [a predominantly Latino high school in east LA] in a neighborhood full of auto-body shops and fast-food joints, was at least as good a school as Mamaroneck, [in affluent Westchester County, New York] in a town of mansions and country clubs.”

The ranking has over the years produced a flurry of critics, riling educators especially who argue (among other things) that trumping quantity over quality is an inadequate, narrow measure of academic performance. One New York public high school principal blasted the Challenge Index as “journalistic Barnum & Bailey.” According to the New York Times, critics also suggest Newsweek is looking for a “cash cow to rival the annual Best College list produced by U.S. News & World Report magazine.”

Still, Matthews’ Challenge Index is at the very least a better intentioned, if not a more egalitarian, yardstick than state and federal assessments, which in Colorado’s case, comes in the hideous form of the loathed CSAP. The battery of annual tests in math, reading, writing and science given each March to Colorado public school kids, grades 3 to 10, the CSAP has been assailed by critics for the assessment’s tendency to favor wealthier school districts, and to punish lower-income schools failing to meet “yearly academic progress.” Gov. Bill Ritter in February passed a bill establishing a more-sophisticated system for tracking individual and school achievement on the CSAP tests, in hopes of shrinking the nearly 30-percentage point achievement gap between poor and minority students and more affluent and white students. But other legislative attempts to revise CSAP standards have failed: in early March, a bill to exempt the CSAP scores of special-education students from the formula used to rate schools was killed, under raucous pressure by State Board of Education officials who argued failure to comply with No Child Left Behind reporting standards would risk Colorado’s losing $100 million in federal funding.

Going beyond the CSAP and AP measures, a global assessment trend gaining ground in public schools in Colorado and nationwide is the highly esteemed International Baccalaureate test, considered the most rigorous high-school curricula in the world. According to Matthews, the IB was designed after World War II for the children of diplomats seeking an internationally recognized diploma. To earn an IB diploma, high-school seniors must pass written college-level exams in six core subjects--language arts, including at least one foreign language, humanities, sciences, mathematics and arts--and write a 4,000-word extended essay on a chosen topic. The IB is now taught to a half-million students worldwide, and is considered the gold standard among Ivy Leagues and top universities abroad. In Colorado, IB diplomas are offered in 21 public high schools, including JeffCo’s Lakewood High School, and Boulder’s Fairview and Niwot High Schools.

Where the CSAP is a failed measure of academic progress, sunk by federal bureaucratic and political entanglements, and the AP test is an equally tired standard, the IB may be the new way, offering a more fitting assessment for college-bound students entering into a global culture.

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