Hindsight is golden but here’s what we know: School closures and remote instruction during the 2020-2021 school year were academic and emotional disasters for most kids and we should have known that from the start.
Yet there is one type of school where students suffered less, notes Jay Mathews in yesterday’s Washington Post, schools where “learning continued at a high level” despite COVID-19 because leaders there remained “committed to deep learning for all students.” Mathews says he’s “not saying high standards are a cure for the damage of pandemics. My only point is that if you look for schools that succeed even in the worst conditions, they tend to demand much from students and help them achieve those goals.”
In New Jersey, three public high schools meet those criteria,* according to Mathews’ “Challenge Index,” which he’s maintained for 24 years. His original hypothesis was if students are encouraged—sometimes even required— to take AP and IB courses, along with the attendant tests, regardless of their grade point average or any other criteria– they’ll fare better out in the real world. He has been proven right: high expectations among teachers and students leads to better life outcomes. The Challenge Index ignores whether kids pass AP/IB tests because Mathews thinks scores “are more a measure of the affluence of parents than of the quality of the school.” Instead he uses a simple ratio of the number of college-level tests taken each year divided by the number of graduating students.
In other words, it’s not about whether you get a 1 or a 5 on your AP Statisitics test. It’s about the experience of participating in a high-level class with “ambitious teaching.” Most high schools, says Mathews, “don’t understand that even students who fail the exams learn more than they would in regular courses.” One teacher in Oregon whose school made the switch to requiring several AP classes for each student didn’t believe it would work but commented, “after a week of initial grumbling, students began to accept AP for Everyone as the norm. My response to any and all concerns was simply, ‘This is what we do here now.’ I’d forgotten how flexible teenagers can be. They quickly accepted and moved on.”
The approach— setting high expectations to maximize students’ educational and social mobility–is anathema to leaders of the Murphy Administration’s Department of Education. Instead, they are doing everything possible to lower standards, taking Murphy’s first Commissioner’s 64 Floor scheme statewide. Here are three recent examples:
Back to Mathews’ list.
Here are the three New Jersey high schools ranked in the top 300 of the Challenge Schools. (Two notes: I left off the fourth because it’s a private high school in Livingston called Newark Academy with a 15% admissions rate and tuition and fees of about $47K a year. Also, it may be worth thinking about why NJ schools comprise only 1% of the national list.)
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