[quote=AN]I totally agree, API has a lot more to do with demographic than how well a school educate the kids. I personally think, as long as the school is ranked 8+ (in HS), it should have enough students in AP level classes to keep the classes full and all the AP classes to be available. It’s only when you drop to the lower API schools, where you might not have enough AP level students to keep all AP classes full. Which would have a higher chance of AP class being canceled due to low interest.[/quote]
Yep.
I find the fact API scores are 3 digits to be tremendously misleading. The difference between a 904 and a 954 is not tremendous. A good student will thrive at either of those hypothetical schools, and a screw-up will still screw-up. The only value that is truly interesting is the “Similar Schools Rank”. Carlsbad schools, for example, tend to have high API scores, but much lower Similar Schools scores; they aren’t doing as much with the material they’re being given compared to a lot of similar schools. Fallbrook has the opposite effect; a lot of its schools overperform relative to similar schools.
Poway District, despite having a sterling reputation, is actually quite mediocre compared to other similar schools. RB High and Westview High in particular have high API scores, but are relatively weak compared to similar schools. If you just look at API you might say “Those are good schools”, but there’s actually a decent chance if you took your student out of there and put them elsewhere they’d actually do better.
