School rankings are always goofy. It’s like college or pro sports rankings, except schools don’t actually play games against each other and rankings can shift a lot depending what you put a premium on. Five teams could take the same data and come up with five quite different sets of rankings.
As for flu’s comment on “wasting resources”, I don’t think it costs the district that much more to have 200 vs. 50 students all take the same AP test. The material covered in AP vs. non-AP Calculus isn’t that different, although in AP you might try to cram a couple topics into the last week or so if the class is behind schedule while non-AP might focus more on mastering what is possible and leaving it at that. I could be wrong about costs associated with pushing middle of the road students to take AP tests.
I’m a pretty firm believer that for the vast majority of students, the difference between a good vs. “great” school is pretty small. There’s a huge downside to going to a bad school. Of course, as I’ve stressed before, I have a friend who teaches at Lincoln, and I would imagine if you took her students and traded them with San Marcos students, their scores wouldn’t shift drastically. That doesn’t mean I want my kids going to Lincoln; there are obvious social issues and potential distractions of attending a school with a large number of under motivated pupils.
Anyways, good for San Marcos. Clearly they are at least doing some things right.
