Nice Work, but Don’t Stop Now
Three Greater Cincinnati high schools are celebrating, and deservedly so, for being named among the 100 best on a national list compiled by U.S. News and World Report.
The names are no surprise to anyone who pays attention to what’s going on locally in education: Indian Hill, ranked 48th best; Wyoming, 81st; Walnut Hills, 83rd.
U.S. News ranked another 10 regional schools among the 1,491 in its next two tiers. Beechwood and Highlands from Northern Kentucky, Mariemont, Sycamore and Madeira in Hamilton County were included in the “silver” category and Walton Verona (in Northern Kentucky), Clark Montessori, Mount Healthy, Withrow University and Lockland were named in the “bronze” category.
The magazine measured such factors as performance on state tests, the presence of college-level coursework and the performance of students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. Educators might quarrel with the details of the magazine’s selection system, but in any case it’s good to see these schools win national recognition for their accomplishments.
Folks in Highlands’ orbit might get an additional surge from knowing that it has also been named a national Blue Ribbon School for 2007, the only public high school in Kentucky (and one of just 30 in the U.S.) to win the designation this year.
But before anyone gets too giddy, there’s another evaluation that ought to get a little attention.
On Tuesday, the results from the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment were released, and they were, in a word, sobering.
These tests are given to 15-year-olds every three years under the auspices of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which includes Europe and most of America’s trading partners. In 2006, 57 countries accounting for nearly 90 percent of the world economy participated in the tests.
Among the chief findings:
Among the 30 OECD member nations, U.S. students ranked 25th in mathematics, 21st in science.
Even the highest achieving U.S. students are at or below the OECD average. Nine percent of the participating American students tested in the top two levels of achievement in science. That’s the OECD average. In math, 8 percent of U.S. students were in the top two tiers; the OECD average is 13 percent.
Nearly one-fourth of U.S. students showed very little proficiency in science, and 28 percent tested below the minimum math level needed to fully participate in the labor market. The average OECD countries do not have such large percentages of low-performing students.
(In case you’re wondering, Finland, Hong Kong and Canada scored highest in science; Finland, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong in math.)
Gene Wilhoit, the former Kentucky education commissioner who now heads the national Council of Chief State School Officers, put as positive a spin as possible on Tuesday’s report. It is, he said, “a unique opportunity to benchmark student learning in the United States with that of emerging and high-performing countries, to learn from the progress of other nations, and to renew our commitment and search for ways to improve educational opportunity for all of our students.”
In short, we’ve got plenty to applaud — and plenty of work to do.
(c) 2007 Cincinnati Post. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.