Washington Post: Lower Merion, Harriton Better Than 93 Percent of U.S. Public High Schools

The Washington Post released their annual national public high school rankings earlier this month, and both Lower Merion School District high schools made the list. The recognition putatively places them in the top 7 percent of the roughly 27,000 public high schools in the country.

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

 ranked ninth in Pennsylvania and 940 nationally by this measure, while placed 17 in the state and 1,333 in the country.

LMSD communications director Doug Young said the district was pleased with the recognition, but emphasized that these honors, while welcome, 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."

With any such rankings can come controversy about the results, the methodology, and the worthiness of the exercise itself. The Post's are no exception.

The paper's 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 Jerusha Conner, Villanova University assistant professor of education and counseling. 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.

Also included in the rankings was Penncrest High School, which placed 18 in the state and 1,375 in the nation, and Radnor High School, which ranked 19 and 1,441.

"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.

Radnor principal Mark Schellenger said his school's culture is responsible for their lofty academic standing: "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."