More Challenged Index

WaPo’s Nick Anderson writes-up some DC-area high schools that make Newsweek’s list of America’s 100 Best High Schools. Sara Mead and I are brought in as the villains for criticizing the list (pdf). There have been other stories like this (eg this one), citing the high schools on the list and then saying “but critics say…” and they engender some interesting emails along the lines of: “How can you say our high school isn’t great!” It’s worth remembering, just because the method the list uses to identify the “best” high schools is, in our view, flawed, doesn’t mean that every single high school on the list is not a great school. We’re not saying that it is a list of uniformly lousy high schools, just that it is uneven. Some are great, it’s just that the method doesn’t systemically identify them and the list has, in our view, some serious flaws. For more on that Sara does a nice job here illustrating how this year’s list again shows that readers aren’t getting a square deal from Newsweek.