Following on yesterday’s post about Dallas ISD’s Talented and Gifted magnet school continuing to dominate the U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings of the best high schools in the country, I received a note from Sara Ortega, a spokeswoman for charter school operator Uplift Education. (Side note: I once had breakfast with Uplift’s CEO. Impressive lady.)
Uplift has 15 North Texas campuses (mostly in Dallas). Ortega took issue with my lumping together charters like the Uplift schools with selective magnet schools:
Uplift Summit International Preparatory is an Uplift Education school, which as you may know, is often criticized as a network (along with all public charters) for cherry picking the best students–the exact thing that magnets do. So, when you say that, “…it does say something that DISD is able to out-compete schools of a similar type,” I would have to politely disagree in that open-enrollment public charters like Uplift Summit are not similar to magnets in that they do not have the ability to only choose elite students.
She then pointed me to the Washington Post’s ranking of the “America’s most challenging high schools,” which was released on Monday. The Post uses a different methodology than U.S. News, even if a bunch of the schools near the top of their respective lists end up the same.
What the Post does differently is use the total number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Cambridge tests administered to a school’s students and divide that by the number of students the school graduated that year. So taking more college-credit tests is their rough method for determining how tough a school is. Another key difference is that the Post excludes schools with “such a high concentration of top students that its average SAT or ACT score exceeds the highest average for any normal-enrollment school in the country” — an effort to level the playing field some by discounting the performance of schools that truly are able to handpick the top percentage of elite students (as was my concern with these sorts of rankings).
DISD’s TAG and Science and Engineering magnets both do well under these standards as well, even though TAG earns No. 6 in the nation instead of the championship belt. It’s behind Science and Engineering too, which rates No. 3 in the “challenge index.”
DISD’s Irma Lerma Rangel Young Women’s Leadership School is all the way up at No. 21 with the Post, while the Dallas International School is the top private-school finisher at No. 24.
The other North Texas schools in the Post‘s top 100 are other DISD magnets (Judge Barefoot Sanders Law Magnet, School of Business and Management) or are operated by Uplift (North Hills Prep in Irving, Summit Prep in Arlington, Williams Prep in Dallas).
