High schools left off of national ranking get recourse

At least four suburban schools mistakenly left off of a Newsweek list of the nation's top high schools have now taken their rightful places in the ranking.

Barrington High and three Naperville schools - North, Central and Neuqua Valley - were left off the list of 1,305 schools the magazine released earlier this week that highlights many other institutions of secondary education in Northwest suburban Cook County and DuPage County.

The Barrington omission was caught by a school parent Kelley Smith.

When she took a glance at the online rankings, Barrington was nowhere to be found - Barrington, Ill., that is.

"I printed out the list and read through it on the train Monday and saw there was a Barrington, R.I.," ranked at No. 542, Smith said.

She did some research and found that while her local Barrington High had made the ranking the past three years, its East Coast namesake never had.

So Smith wrote to Newsweek Tuesday morning and said editors there told her they'd check it out.

"Tuesday afternoon, Newsweek wrote back and said, 'Whoops,'" Smith said.

Staffers told her it had been a computer glitch and that all the information on the Web site was correct - except for the state.

"It was a nice piece of sleuthing on her part," Barrington High Principal Emil Rode said.

The author of the Newsweek report said other schools from across the country also may be missing from the initial list and a revised ranking will be placed on the magazine's Web site next week.

Rankings are based on the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and/or Cambridge tests taken by students in a school divided by the number of graduating seniors.

"I think the students and staff and community deserve to know (the Naperville schools are on the list) and I'm proud of them for it," Naperville Unit District 203 Superintendent Alan Leis said. "You have to be careful about any one measure … as the sole barometer of success, but I believe in the AP program."

Neuqua and North were both on the list last year, ranked 607 and 1,101 respectively.

When the 2008 ranking was released, District 203 and Indian Prairie Unit District 204 officials were surprised not to see the three schools on the list. Both districts place an emphasis on taking AP courses in order to gain college-level experience.

District 204's Waubonsie Valley in Aurora did appear on the initial list at number 1,079.

Naperville administrators contacted Jay Mathews, the Newsweek contributing editor and Washington Post education columnist who devised the ranking formula, and asked him to take a second look at their schools.

When added to the list, Neuqua likely will be ranked in the upper 800s, Naperville North should fit into the lower 900s and Central will be in the upper 900s.

Other DuPage schools on the list are Hinsdale Central (339), Hinsdale South in Darien (540), Glenbard West in Glen Ellyn (932), Glenbard East in Lombard (1,127), Wheaton North (1,238), Downers Grove North (1,247), Glenbard South near Glen Ellyn (1,266), Willowbrook in Villa Park (1,302) and York in Elmhurst (1,305).

Other area schools that made the list were Stevenson in Lincolnshire(150), Hersey in Arlington Heights (467), Vernon Hills (638), Libertyville (720), Buffalo Grove (735), Maine South in Park Ridge (840), Fremd in Palatine (919), Prospect in Mount Prospect (948), Conant in Hoffman Estates (1,015) Schaumburg (1,125) and St. Charles North (1,143).

"We are very proud of both of our high schools," District 204 Superintendent Stephen Daeschner said in an e-mail to the district, referring to Neuqua and Waubonsie. "Having both our schools make this list is a nice affirmation of the work being done to best prepare our students for college."

Mathews said over the past few years, about 50 to 75 schools are typically added to the lists after they are published. This year, 33 schools already have proven they qualify but were left out.

When ranking schools, Newsweek sends out forms for school officials to fill out regarding AP tests, Mathews said. Sometimes they are mistakenly addressed to people who are no longer at the school. Other times the person who receives it may get caught up in other work and forget to fill it out.

Small schools sometimes get left out too, Mathews said. Their low number of seniors may result in a small number of AP tests and therefore they don't always show up in the databases Newsweek accesses even though they qualify to be on the list.

"For many reasons I love the Web and one of them is the Web allows me to put on top of our new list that comes out on the Newsweek Web site an invitation for anyone we may have missed to get back to us," Mathews said.

Some also may have been wondering why the Illinois Math and Science Academy is also not on the list. Newsweek didn't forget the Aurora school, but instead filed it under, "The Public Elites."