Editorial: Are rankings fair to schools?

It’s long past time that we evaluate schools honestly.

Assessments of schools by magazines like U.S. News and World Report or websites like GreatSchools.org or Pittsburgh’s own Niche.com are often used to decide where to send a kid or where to buy a house. They evaluate schools based on a variety of factors, including test scores, free and reduced lunch program participants, graduation rates, the colleges that students attend, student-to-teacher ratios and more. If there is a way to attach a number to score a school, it is poked and prodded and jammed into an algorithm that spits out a grade comparing it to other schools.

Is this really accurate? Considering every company’s evaluation works with their own set of criteria presented in their own format, it’s likely they are all kind of right.

But is it always fair?

U.S. News recently released its high school rankings. Nationally, the top school is Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va.

It should be among the best. While it is a public school, it has a competitive application system more complicated than many expensive colleges. Graduates include Rhodes Scholars and a MacArthur Fellow, at least one chess grand master, a U.S. Circuit Court judge, a minor tech billionaire and the governor of New Hampshire.

The highest ranked Pennsylvania school is Julia R. Masterman Secondary in Philadelphia. A magnet school, it is similarly competitive, with only 3% of applicants accepted. For comparison? Carnegie Mellon’s acceptance rate is 17.3%. Harvard’s is 5%. Its alumni roster is star-studded, including Kevin Bacon, Leslie Odom Jr. and Will Smith.

But does being competitive make a school good, or does it just stack the deck when it comes to those indicators like test scores and college acceptance?

North Allegheny High School is listed by Niche.com as the best public high school in the Greater Pittsburgh area. U.S. News places it at No. 936 nationally and No. 28 statewide. Its rankings put it in eighth place in Pittsburgh, proving the differences in the equations used by different agencies.

In Westmoreland County, Niche puts Franklin Regional in first place. U.S. News ranks it No. 1,168 nationally and No. 35 in the state.

But when you look at good schools, it is like looking at the graduating class at M.I.T. No matter how far down the class ranking you go, the GPA is still pretty good. Franklin Regional’s grade from U.S. News is a 93.45 out of 100 — a solid A.

A good school is a school that strives to make all students better on the last day of class than they were on the first.

So, while it is the schools at the top of these lists that get the accolades, we can’t neglect that there are a lot of schools in the middle of these lists that are succeeding wildly by making kids want to come to school and preparing them for successful, happy lives that just don’t happen to involve being the CEO of a pharmaceutical company.

At the same time, more attention needs to be paid to the schools nearer the bottom of the lists because they are the ones where teachers are drowning while trying to keep kids afloat. Where school boards are doing what they can to educate while not taxing an aging population to death. Where everyone still puts in the work but doesn’t get to turn away 97% of the students at the door, boosting their test numbers and graduation rates.