High School Rankings

Google and Chrome have killed my once compulsive bookmarking.  Our Firefox bookmarks have been accumulating since before we moved to Vermont; since Sarah no longer uses the desktop for her primary web browsing, she's given me license to clean house.  Some of the things I bookmarked were interesting, like my high school district website... as if I would have difficult finding it if I needed it.  


At any rate, they had linked to this Newsweek ranked list of the top 500 public high schools in the U.S. (though you can't tell that from the title), because OTHS made the list.  I don't know if I have the time or energy to properly criticize this kind of endeavor, but while they seem to mostly be interested in the "best" *college prep* high schools (as determined by a narrow band of statistics), at the same time they don't account for where kids are going to college (presumably Newsweek's definition of "best" would rank a HS that sent more kids to 4-year colleges than one that sent more kids to 2-year colleges; look at the NJ Monthly ranking to see how the 2-vs.4-year college matriculation rates vary wildly across schools).  This is like the bad old days of baseball statistics where the Cy Young award was generally simply given to the pitcher with the most wins, with strikeouts and ERA as a tiebreaker, with little regard for factors like run support or BABIP.



So, the top 25 of Newsweek's rankings is littered with magnet schools, and all I can think is: Really?  No kidding?  When you get to pick which kids go to your school, your students all perform well?  Wow.  That's about as insightful as putting Harvard and Princeton at the top of U.S. News and World Report's list. Get me some pre- and post-testing and we'll see how each school is really performing.



There's also no idea here of what the difference is between ranks.  There's this "Newsweek Score", and presumably there's very little difference between 2.874 and 2.807, but how much better is 2.8 vs 1.8?  And are we supposed to be whipped into some sort of competitive frenzy by this?  Where did OTHS place, anyway?  Somewhere in the 400's?  Yup, just ahead of... rival school Red Bank. 

Woooowooooo!  SUCK IT, Red Bank!  In your face!  ;-)


I've put the Newsweek rankings data in a spreadsheet on Google Docs, so if you're interested, you can analyze it however you like, but I'm afraid it's mostly GIGO.