High School Ratings & NCLB

I plan on writing much more about the school system over the next year. My thoughts lately have been on the degree to which the elementary classroom is better suited to girls than boys, at least boys like my son. But while I ponder these issues in a stew in my brain, take a gander at some other school info that has been sitting in my inbox:


Here is a guy, who for fun, ranks Ohio public schools. For what its' worth:
(Click for larger view)

From the above graph, here are his numbers for CPS High Schools:
Walnut Hills: 114.8
Clark Montes: 105.9
SCPA : 100.8
RA Taft Tech: 99.0
West Side Mon: 97.7
Dater HS: 97.6
Schroeder Pad: 97.6
Withrow: 95.0
Western Hills: 90.2

Ohio Largest Districts Compared

Here is a PDF of the full report.




Also, here is an article from a few months ago about the possible changing of "No Child Left Behind":

...the past eight years should leave us wary of relying solely on isolated test results for high-stakes decision-making. She isn't against tests per se—or even tests being used as one element in a more comprehensive evaluation system. Schools have to have some way of judging performance...

...an astonishing 83 percent of charter schools were either no better or actually worse than traditional public schools serving similar populations. Indeed, the authors concluded that bad charter schools outnumber good ones by a ratio of roughly 2 to 1.

...The dirty dark secret of NCLB is that we may know how to identify the worst performing schools, but no one (yet) knows how to turn them around in any consistent and reliable way. And I mean no one. Not the Gates Foundation to date. Not most charter programs. No one.

... "The only guaranteed strategy [for improving schools] is to change the student population, replacing low-performing students with higher-performing students." And this is, in fact, what the rare success stories—like KIPP—typically do: skim off the best and most motivated students from disadvantaged neighborhoods....

...In the 1950s, smart women, except for truly determined trailblazers, had few professional options beyond teaching. Ditto for blacks and other minorities. If you had a particularly smart and ambitious daughter, people would say, "I bet she grows up to be a teacher!" While many things have happened to public schools over the last 50 years, one of the most important is that this low-cost captive labor pool of extremely talented men and women has evaporated completely—and along with it the respect that was once automatically accorded to those who entered the profession...

...trying to evaluate teachers solely on the basis of crude standardized tests is too reductive and will likely only alienate the kind of creative, dynamic people the profession hopes to attract in greater numbers. But the question remains: How do we lure more, talented people to the profession and give them—and the many superb teachers who already exist—the support and respect they deserve? For all its faults, if NCLB has done nothing else, it's helped to clarify this challenge.