U.S. News and World Report has ranked U.S. high schools. Three Dayton area high schools — Bellbrook, Centerville, and Oakwood — received the ranking of “silver,” the second highest ranking. No local high schools received ranking of “gold,” U.S. News’ highest ranking.

The Dayton Daily News in an editorial today, “U.S. News’ School Rankings Also Fall Short,” makes this observation: “Not to take anything away from the area schools that showed well on the U.S. News list, but they’re all really homogenous schools and/or relatively wealthy — at least as compared to schools where test scores and other indicators are awful. Succeeding in schools where children come from strong homes and strong communities is always going to be easier.”

U.S. News explains its high school ranking procedure is a three step process. Here are excerpts from the magazine’s explanation:

• The first step determined whether each school’s students were performing better than statistically expected for the average student in their state. We started by looking at reading and math test results for all students on each state’s high school test. We then factored in the percentage of economically disadvantaged students (who tend to score lower) enrolled at the school to find which schools were performing better than their statistical expectations.
• For those schools that made it past this first step, the second step determined whether the school’s least-advantaged students (black, Hispanic, and low-income) were performing better than average for similar students in the state. We compared each school’s math and reading proficiency rates for disadvantaged students with the statewide results for these disadvantaged student groups and then selected schools that were performing better than this state average.
• Schools that made it through those first two steps became eligible to be judged nationally on the final step: college-readiness performance, using Advanced Placement data as the benchmark for success. (AP is a College Board program that offers college-level courses at high schools across the country.) This third step measured which schools produced the best college-level achievement for the highest percentages of their students. This was done by computing a “college readiness index” based on the weighted average of the AP participation rate (the number of 12th-grade students who took at least one AP test before or during their senior year, divided by the number of 12th graders) along with how well the students did on those AP tests or quality-adjusted AP participation (the number of 12th-grade students who took and passed (received an AP score of 3 or higher) at least one AP test before or during their senior year, divided by the number of 12th graders at that school). For the college readiness index, the quality-adjusted AP participation rates were weighted 75 percent in the calculation, and 25 percent of the weight was placed on the simple AP participation rate.

Interesting article in Sunday’s New York Times entitled, “Lots of Little Screens: TV Is Changing Shape,” tells about new TV and video production companies that are forming to take advantage of a growing demand for video on the internet.

The articles says, “According to Move Networks, a company based in Utah that provides online video technologies, more than 100,000 new viewers jump online every 24 hours to watch its clients’ long-form or episodic video. During the first two weeks of November alone, more than twice the number of Americans were watching TV online than in the entire month of August.”

And, the article says, “Inexpensive broadband access has done far more for online video than enable the success of services like YouTube and iTunes. By unchaining video watchers from their TV sets, it has opened the floodgates to a generation of TV producers for whom the Internet is their native medium.”

Excerpts from the article:

• The command-and-control economic model of traditional television is being quickly superseded by the market chaos of a freewheeling and open digital network.
• The shift is proving quite inspirational to digital media entrepreneurs. “What absolutely convinced me to start a company in this area was when I realized just how large the disruption was,” said Kip McClanahan, the co-founder and chief executive of ON Networks, an online studio in Austin, Tex. “It touches everything — how video content is created and monetized, how it’s distributed and consumed. And it’s a half-trillion-dollar market, if you include the advertising that supports it and the revenue associated with subscriptions, tickets and so on.”
• (The huge internet market) provides plenty of room for experimentation. Many flavors of technology and programming are being tested, as are some changes in traditional revenue models.
• Vuze, based in Palo Alto, and Joost, based in Leiden in the Netherlands have developed proprietary software that must be downloaded to view their video programming. In addition to providing programming from established brands like PBS, Showtime, the BBC and A&E, the start-ups encourage new producers to make deals with them and upload new programs to their sites.
• Vuze, Joost, Blip and ON all share as much as 50 percent of their revenue with the content producers, regardless of distribution medium. “If that model existed today, writers wouldn’t be on strike,” said Mr. McClanahan.

“Lots of Little Screens: TV Is Changing Shape,” was written by Denise Caruso and appeared in The New York Times, Sunday, December 2.

Noted education expert, Linda Darling-Hammond, in an interesting blog at The Forum for Education and Democracy, says, “We need to encourage our schools to teach and evaluate the higher-order thinking and performance skills that leading nations emphasize in their systems, and this requires major changes in No Child Left Behind.”

Excerpts from Linda Darling-Hammond’s blog:

• A key problem for the United States is that most of our tests aren’t measuring the kinds of 21st century skills we need students to acquire and that are at the core of curriculum and assessment in high-achieving countries.
• The United States is falling far behind other nations on every measure of educational achievement. In the latest international assessments, the United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in math – on par with Latvia – 20th in science, and 19th in reading, even further behind than a few years ago. In addition, these other countries surpass us in graduation rates and, over the last decade, in higher education participation as well.
• Although 60 percent of our high school graduates go off to college, only half of these are well-enough prepared to graduate with a degree – far too few for the knowledge economy we now operate. So, while our own youth are often unprepared for modern employment, Silicon Valley lobbies for more H-1B visas to bring in skilled workers to fill high-tech jobs.
• Our multiple-choice tests – which focus the curriculum on low-level skills – are helping us to fall further and further behind. Another part of the problem is that the standards used to guide teaching in many states are a mile wide and an inch deep: Most high-achieving countries teach (and test) fewer topics each year and teach them more thoroughly so students build a stronger foundation for their learning.
• Whereas students in most parts of the United States are typically asked simply to recognize a single fact they have memorized from a list of answers, students in high-achieving countries are asked to apply their knowledge in the ways that writers, mathematicians, historians and scientists do.
• Students in other countries also complete required assessments like lab experiments and research papers that help evaluate student learning in the classroom. These assessments, which together count at least half the total examination score, allow the testing of complex skills that cannot be measured in a two-hour test on a single day. They ensure that students receive stronger learning opportunities. And they give teachers timely information they need to help students improve – something that standardized tests that produce scores several months later cannot do.  These assessments in other nations are not used to rank or punish schools, or to deny promotion or graduation to students. (In fact, several countries have explicit proscriptions against such practices.) They are used to evaluate curricula and guide professional learning – in short, to help schools improve.
• By asking students to show what they know through real-world applications of knowledge, these other nations’ assessment systems promote serious intellectual work that is discouraged in U.S. schools by the tests many states have adopted under No Child Left Behind.
• Studies confirm that as teaching looks more like testing, U.S. students are doing less writing, less science, less history, reading fewer books, and even using computers less in states that will not allow their use on standardized tests.

From Linda Darling-Hammond’s article: No Child Left Behind: Changing the Way We Think About Learning