As discussed in detail in my May 30 blog post, “Adjusting the Best High Schools Rankings for Government Data Errors,” the federal government found that data from the 2009-2010 school year for a small number of schools that appeared in the U.S. News 2012 Best High Schools rankings was incorrect, says Robert J. Morse for U.S. News. The information came from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which collects data from states for all public elementary and secondary schools annually and publishes that data on the Common Core of Data (CCD) website. As a result of these errors in the federal government data, the U.S. News rankings for a few schools with these data errors were not correct. The federal government has now finished rechecking all public high school data; it has issued a final tally of which schools had incorrect data in 2009-2010 and has removed that data from the CCD website…
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Readers: Six ways to rate a high school’s quality
TIME magazine, U.S. News, and other publications have begun to release their “best” school rankings for 2012. Many of these rankings rely on two key factors in particular: standardized test scores and high school graduation rates. But are these the best criteria?
The magazines’ annual rankings of the best American high schools have been criticized for relying too heavily on data that are skewed by the abilities of students entering these institutions to begin with.
We wanted to know how our readers would like their schools to be evaluated, so we recently asked: “If you could only choose one, what’s the most important characteristic to evaluate a school’s success?”…Read More