Top Schools With Room For Improvement

The News & Advance
Published: May 22, 2008

In the United States, there are close to 27,000 public high schools, filled with tens of thousands of dedicated faculty and hundreds of thousands of students.

With varying degrees of success, they struggle daily in the pursuit of education, the great engine of democracy as envisioned by Thomas Jefferson.

On Monday, the Newsweek and Washington Post Challenge Index was released, ranking the nation’s top 1,400 high schools. In Virginia, 83 schools made the grade, two of them in Central Virginia and both in the city of Lynchburg: E.C. Glass and Heritage high schools.

According to the organizers of the yearly survey, the formula is rather straightforward: “Divide the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests a school gave by the number of seniors who graduated in May or June. Tests taken by all students, not just seniors, are counted. Magnet or charter schools with SAT combined verbal and math averages higher than 1300, or ACT average scores above 29, are not included, since they do not have enough average students who need a challenge.”

That’s it; no statistical hokus-pokus and mumbo-jumbo.

Glass ranked at No. 714, while Heritage clocked in at No. 1,333. And here’s something for all the school boards and administrators in the area to ponder: Glass and Heritage are the only Central Virginia public high schools ever to make the grade on this prestigious listing, despite some glaring socio-economic strikes against them.

(And, by the way, that includes the public school systems in the surrounding suburban counties.)

Glass and Heritage’s ranking on the nationwide list is all the more impressive considering one, glaring statistic: the percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced lunches. The higher the percentage, i.e., the greater number of students in poverty or close to it, the tougher the educational environment at the school. At Glass, 34 percent of all students qualify for subsidized lunches; at Heritage, it’s even higher at 41 percent of all students.

Glass, for example, has ranked in the top 1,000 since first making the list in 2003. Heritage has been in the rankings since 2005. On average, 15 percent of seniors at the average high school in America are eligible for college credit based upon scores on one of the three qualifying tests. At Glass, 32 percent of seniors qualified, while at Heritage, 21 percent made the grade.

Public education in general — and specifically, in Central Virginia — faces a great many challenges. Unfunded or barely funded mandates from Richmond and Washington, report requirements handed down by bureaucrats who’ve never set foot in a classroom in their lives, know-it-all critics for whom everything was better before this or that Supreme Court ruling, stingy local governing bodies that cut off their fiscal noses to spite their financial faces and even stingier, grumpier taxpayers who refuse to acknowledge their collective responsibility toward the public schools. The list just goes on ad nauseum.

And still, education — good education — takes place on a daily basis.

There absolutely are areas that need improvement. Government and special interest groups of all stripes need to get their noses and their agendas out of the classroom. Unfunded mandates and idiotic outcomes-based indicators ought to be trashed, in turn reducing the number of central office bureaucrats needed to produce the inane reports required by Washington or Richmond.

Each and every American public school contains both the keys to success for public education and the sources of its many problems. At Glass and Heritage, while there are many problem areas, there are also many parts of the solution to the woes of public education.