The 1,622nd Best High School in the Nation

On Monday, William H. Hughes learned that Newsweek magazine had ranked his high school as one of the best in the nation. To be exact, it was tied for No. 1,622 on a list of 1,623 high schools.

Was that an honor? Sure, says Mr. Hughes, principal at Winfield High School, in West Virginia. “We’re excited about it,” he says. “It’s a good thing, but it was not our goal to make the list. Our goal was to have more students in AP classes.”

Newsweek creates its list of “America’s Best High Schools” by taking the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and Cambridge (AICE) tests given at a particular school each year, and then dividing that total by the number of graduating seniors. Schools with at least one test per graduate made the list (about 6 percent of high schools).

The formula, known as the “Challenge Index,” is controversial, to say the least. For one thing, the equation provides a rather narrow measure of quality, one that doesn’t reveal achievement gaps among students from different socioeconomic backgrounds, among other things.

Mr. Hughes is a believer in AP, and he has done much to encourage the program’s growth at Winfield, where more than 85 percent of seniors went on to attend college last year. This fall, the school will offer Advanced Placement courses in 15 subjects, double the number it had just five years ago, he says.

Yet that growth presents him with a challenge: ensuring that there are enough qualified instructors to teach all the school’s courses. He has told the state’s Department of Education that his school needs more resources.

“When we have an AP government course, we don’t have 30 people sign up for it—we have 12 or 13,” Mr. Hughes says. “I want AP, but the kids who aren’t capable, I don’t want them to be slighted. I don’t want them to be in a social studies class of 35. I’m responsible for the education of every kid in this school, not just the top 15 percent.”

So Mr. Hughes isn’t sure whether one can draw any great meaning from a ranking of high schools based on a single measure. Newsweek‘s Web site invites high schools to link to the rankings (“Brag about it by adding this list to your Web site”), but Winfield officials had yet to determine if they would do so.

Either way, Mr. Hughes figures plenty of people in his community will take note of the mention, just like they did when BusinessWeek recently hailed Winfield as the best high school in the West Virginia. “People who move here and want to buy a house, they notice those kinds of things,” he says.

After all, it’s human nature. So writes Jay Matthews, the longtime education reporter who created the Challenge Index. In his answers to frequently-asked questions about the high-school list, Mr. Matthews describes himself as “mildly ashamed” of his reason for ranking, but explains his hope that the rankings will stir debate, prompt thinking, and, in turn, help high schools improve.

“We humans are tribal primates with a deep commitment to pecking orders,” Mr. Matthews writes. “We cannot resist looking at ranked lists. It doesn’t matter what it is—SUVs, ice-cream stores, football teams, fertilizer dispensers. We want to see who is on top and who is not.”

And if you didn’t finish 1,622nd this time around, there’s always next year.