TheApple

The newsweek article http://theapple.monster.com/education/articles/8642-highest-ranked-public-high-schools-in-us-2009 lists the top 1500 public high schools in the country. Looking at the top 200 it seems that these are exclusive communities, but I am not familiar with the bulk of them. What do you think? How should schools be measured? Should your average community be ranked against a community with double the income? Just wondering.

I think the definition was determined by some Texan.

My experience as a teacher was in New Mexico also.    At that time New Mexico was the 47th economically poorest state in the U.S.

We had a low literacy rating ~ and many of the parents of our students did not particularly "value" education, so they were minimally supportive.  

To my thinking, I believe the socio-economic status, paired with cultural diversity, is a MAJOR differentiation between school success, or the lack thereof.

We should not even be compared with high-income, predominantly anglo schools ~ it doesn't work at all.

Many of my students did not use English as their primary language in the home.  And, their cultural background did not place emphasis on the same base information as the Standardized Tests did, for example:  many of my students did not know who Christopher Columbus was...because to the Native American people he did not discover America!  

On the screening test I used (Slosson IQ test) as high as 70% of my students missed the Columbus question.     Is that fair?

IT IS NOT FAIR. And I personally think that if there is going to be a standard it has to be a fair standard by which to maeasure. I think that there should be information that would be level in success. Christopher Columbus landed on this land, but he was not the first person here. He found a place western people knew nothing about. But it was not lost. The natives knew it was here and enjoyed it for many centuries before Columbus landed on the dry land of this country. I would like to see questions that relate to Native history if we are going to teach about history I think we should teach both sides. That is fair.

Sorry, I will step off my soap box now and be nice.

that is because we live in a society that wants microwave answers and hold the history and true facts. I am still ticked about the morons wanting to take the holocaust out of our textbooks because it was mean. Hello, it is history and people are mean.

Thank you for saying I am nice. I don't feel so nice when people try to erase things that happen and pretend that they do not exist. I believe that if we do not like the way things were done back then, then we should look at how they progressed that way and make sure we don't follow the same foot steps.