Patty Miller
EDMOND — Two Edmond high schools made it on Newsweek’s list of America’s best high schools. This year the list includes 1,258 names.
Edmond North ranked 448 and Edmond Santa Fe ranked 1,098. These two schools joined five other Oklahoma schools including the Classen School of Advanced Studies in Oklahoma City.
“We are always pleased when our schools are recognized nationally for something they have done well,” said Superintendent David Goin.
“I congratulate the principals of the two schools, Vicki Simpson at Santa Fe and Dr. Ed Story at North. Principal leadership, personnel hired within the schools and the support of the parents in the district all work together to set Edmond apart.
“It takes effort from the elementary schools to the high schools to consistently demonstrate the high level of achievement attained by all of our schools in the Edmond district.”
Simpson is retiring this year while Story will move to Heritage Hall as the dean of students.
Public schools on the list are ranked according to a ratio devised by Jay Mathews at Newsweek.
“I decided to create my own index to measure something I thought was more important — which schools were giving their students the most value,” Mathews stated in his story online.
With some help, Mathews developed a scale, the Challenge Index, which used schools’ participation in college-level tests to indicate which schools were the most demanding and supportive. Just taking a course, like Advanced Placement, and then the test, mattered more than the score because students were challenged.
The ranking is achieved by taking the number of AP, International Baccalaureate and/or Cambridge tests taken by all students at a school in 2006 divided by the number of graduating seniors.
The resulting score is an index of at least 1.000 and the schools are in the top 5 percent of public schools measured this way.
“I want to recognize those schools with the teachers who add the most value, even in inner-city schools where no one has yet found a way to reduce dropouts or raise test scores significantly,” Mathews said.
