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Americans love ranking things, the affirmation that comes with being No. 1.
When we're judged to be atop the heap, we don't worry too much about the how and why. We like the number, not the messy calculation behind it.
I used to pooh-pooh the flurry of talk when various rankings of high schools and colleges came out. Not anymore. Because everyone takes them seriously, I do too but for a different reason: I fear rankings can get in the way of numbers that do matter.
A few days ago I sat at Panera Bread with representatives from my college alma mater. One of their missions in coming to the Tampa Bay area was to persuade all alumni to give something, anything, to the university. Why? Because U.S. News and World Report, in ranking colleges, cares about the percentage of alumni who give. Get everyone to pony up a few bucks, and the ranking might rise. This, from a place that has seven Nobel Prize winners on its faculty. These are very smart people. They know better, but they cannot help it.
In school districts and colleges across America, we all know better. But we can't help playing the game, serene in the warm and fuzzy feeling that a top ranking — yes, we are among the best — gives us.
Last week, Newsweek once again released its list of "America's Top Public High Schools." The Center for Advanced Technologies at Lakewood High School in St. Petersburg ranked No. 22 in the nation. Wow! Right?
The rankings, which were devised as the Challenge Index by Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews, have a clear purpose, which he freely admits: To push schools to let students, even ones who haven't demonstrated great talent, take the college-level Advanced Placement courses and exams. His view is that by opening these courses up to all comers, the students, even those who try and fail, are better for having tried. So far, so good.
But wait. What does the ranking tell us? Nothing more and nothing less than this: It's a ratio — how many Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exams were taken by students divided by the number of graduating seniors. That's it.
That's good as an incentive for schools to make their AP courses more democratic. The problem occurs when this rough-cut formula is used to "rank" schools. The higher the ratio, the higher a school's rank. There's a weird consequence. Your ratio gets better either by taking more tests or by having fewer graduates, if they're not the ones taking the AP tests. This method unintentionally rewards a school for having kids drop out. That's bad enough, but people give the ranking far more weight and meaning than Mathews ever intended.
Some years ago, when Palm Harbor University High's rank dropped and St. Petersburg High's rose, a Palm Harbor teacher worried that the sky was falling. I even assigned a story to try to explain what was going on because it seemed odd that Palm Harbor was getting A's under Florida's school grades (don't even get me started on that system) and falling in Newsweek's rankings, while St. Petersburg High, earning only B's and C's, was climbing.
The short answer: Palm Harbor was, and is, a fine school. It was simply graduating too many regular students for the ratio to work out in its favor. But the drop had caused tangible worry. (St. Petersburg High, which plummeted to No. 303 this year — oh, my goodness! — is pretty much the same school it was when it ranked No. 24 some years ago. But try telling that to a rating-obsessed parent; the IB program that drives the rankings hasn't changed. In part, the school is graduating more students from its traditional program. The shame.)
Sure, it's cool to be able to proclaim "one of the best high schools in America" on a school marquee or Web site — and believe me, given the chance they all do — but it would be more accurate to say "our students took (but not necessarily passed) more AP and IB tests divided by the number of graduating seniors than the next school down the list." That wouldn't be a marquee slogan. It would merely be the truth.
So here's my real worry. A ranking is a number that can keep us from focusing on some numbers that do matter. A year ago I wrote about the coming resegregation of Pinellas County schools as they returned to "neighborhood schools," or at least "close to home schools." As in many urban school districts with segregated housing patterns, it would be possible to have desegregated schools or to have neighborhood schools. But it would be hard to have both.
The way new lines were drawn for school boundaries could have mitigated the wave of resegregation. For St. Petersburg High — the alma mater of Gov. Charlie Crist — the line largely follows Central Avenue, the physical and psychological boundary between northern and southern St. Petersburg. Even though it's only five blocks north of Central, the school is now mostly closed to students who live south of that street. Just south of Central is the heart of Midtown, a predominantly black area of the city. The first year under this new system, the school expects 86 black freshmen this fall, a huge drop from the 145 African-American sophomores. That is a number that matters.
In the eastern part of Midtown, elementary students don't have a "close to home" school in a meaningful sense of the word. Their school is North Shore Elementary, miles away, north of St. Petersburg's Old Northeast neighborhood. Ironically, that's not much of a change for those black students from the old days of busing for desegregation, when they were transported out of their neighborhoods year after year. Nobody planned this stark contrast. Yet there it is. That distance of 4.5 miles is a number that matters.
Nobody intended for our achievement gap to be as gaping as it is. That is a number that matters. Or for our graduation rate to be so poor. Yes, another number that matters.
Almost exactly two years ago, I shook the hands of all 445 students at St. Petersburg High's graduation. Only a handful were black males, the few who had made it all the way through high school. One was a young man of promise named Forbes Swisher, headed to college on a scholarship.
By graduating, Forbes Swisher was swimming against a strong tide that too often swamps young black men. But you know what, because he wasn't an IB kid, his graduation would have hurt the school's Newsweek numbers, even if ever so slightly.
Days after we shook hands, he was shot and killed after he answered the call from a friend seeking backup in a fight. His killer has not been caught. In the years since, too many other young black men have died violently, lives ended before they even really began. More of these kids need to graduate. Fewer of them need to die. These are the numbers we need to focus on and fix.
In Pinellas and across America, are we drawing school boundaries, are we building a school system, are we doing all we can to keep kids in school and learning, to raise graduation rates, to help those who already face great challenges and to challenge those who are already high achievers? Or are we taking our eye off the ball with a sideways glance at school rankings that don't mean what we think while a hard high fastball is rocketing straight at our heads? Numbers matter. Let's make sure we're looking at the right ones.
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