PAUSD Participates in Newsweek Magazine Challenge Index Data

The Palo Alto Unified School District is participating this year in the annual Challenge Index done by Newsweek Magazine and its education editor, Jay Matthews, by providing the requested information needed to evaluate Gunn and Palo Alto high schools. Last year the schools decided not to participate and were left off the list.

The rationale for participating this year centers on two issues. First, the district is committed to transparency. This is part of the focused goal to improve communication both within the system and to the larger public. Not participating might be perceived as counter to this goal.

The second reason for our participation is our belief that a crucial underlying assumption of the Challenge Index is true. Students do need challenging curricula where they can be measured against their peers. In far too many secondary schools, both public and private, students do not have access to rigorous classes, and their communities do not know how their schools compare to other schools. As a result, students and families can be lulled into believing their children are ready for college work when, in fact, they are not. While our schools offer enormously rich and varied curricula with many, many challenging Advanced Placement, honors, and regular classes, we recognize this is not true in every community, and it should be.

The old Challenge Index divided the number of AP exams taken at a school by the number of seniors in the student body. Schools were given an index and Newsweek Magazine published this list of schools.

We did not feel this simplistic Challenge Index was an effective measure of looking at the quality of schools. It ignored the pass rate of students on the exams, the socio-economics of a school, and the particularities of schools in terms of the sizes of the classes. Perhaps more importantly in our community, it signals that taking AP classes is far more important in terms of a student's high school experience than we believe is accurate.

This year Newsweek Magazine has come up with a new formula for the Challenge Index that uses more criteria that we feel will be more reflective in measuring schools. While there are still some shortcomings, we feel the new Challenge Index is a better measure of schools than it was in the past.

Measuring the quality of a high school is nearly impossible and the Challenge Index is by no means perfect, particularly for high schools like ours. On balance, we believe our community can sort out this measure, and our obligation to K-12 education encourages us to share our data with our community and the education world at large.