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Sunday, August 21, 2011

Jersey Jazzman: School Ranking Fail

Jersey Jazzman: School Ranking Fail

School Ranking Fail

Every year, the Washington Post's Jay Matthews ranks America's high schools. His system makes things easy for him: he simply takes the number of AP or IB tests a school gives each year and divides it by the numbers of seniors. He doesn't bother with the actual results of the tests; too complicated, I guess.

Since I'm a Jersey guy, I thought I'd look up the Jersey schools. #1 is Dr. Ronald E. McNair in Jersey City, which is a magnet school and, I understand, outstanding. I thought Matthew's rules would have excluded it, because competitive schools like Stuyvesant in New York City with high concentrations of the best and the