I?m pleased to see that the Raleigh Charter School and the BASIS Charter School (in Tucson) are ranked high by Newsweek, as Terry Stoops pointed out today, but I have had doubts about this ranking ever since it began.
Why does having so many advanced placement classes make a school ?the best?? To my mind, AP classes are a tracking device that groups smarter kids together. It?s a way of getting around the populist mindset that says that everyone is ?just the same? and everyone should be ?mainstreamed,? not separated. Having a lot of AP classes means that a school has lot of smart students, but , in my view, it says little about the quality of teaching.
