Today's sign that the apocalypse is upon us

Today US News published its annual list of the "best high schools".

Some people are complaining about the methodology, though methinks this is sour grapes because they want to score higher. And some people are pointing out actual mistakes in the data used in the rankings, which should be appreciated (especially when a principal is saying a school doesn't deserve its ranking).

While this critique from the NASSP points out that objective rankings are impossible no matter the methodology due to the huge variability in contexts from state to state in standards, rigor, and school funding (not to mention the issue of societal inequities affecting the populations that attend the various schools), and it makes a suggestion instead to look at the degree of improvement in student performance, even this misses the point. There's a much larger problem than these, since no methodology is going to satisfy everyone all the time, as this isn't an empirical scientific experiment anyway: just as grading students is an intellectually dishonest way of reducing student understanding to a meaningless, subjective, abstract symbol, so to is attempting to rank schools! What is this obsession and desire to compare everyone against everyone else, or every school against every other - why do we want to judge the quality of the student, rather than celebrate her successes and support her in tackling her challenges? This ranking does nothing but provide schools on the list with an opportunity to add a gold, silver or bronze star to their websites and Wikipedia pages, and give districts the chance to issue self-congratulatory press releases. It's a grotesque trivialization of the teaching and learning that goes on in every one of these schools, and it's shameful, exploitative attempt to sell magazines based on activating people's emotions, be they pride and joy or fear and anger.

We - by which I mean the American public and media - need a better, more nuanced, more thoughtful way of thinking about what it means for a school to be good, beyond test scores (and, fortunately, there are lots of teachers, administrators, researchers, theorists, and even a few policy makers who are thinking about this). There are many things I would be interested in knowing about schools - how well they fulfill their mission and learning objectives for their student bodies, how well they do at closing the achievement/equity gap between whites and minorities or between the middle class and the poor, how well they do at cultivating engaged and active citizens on the local and state and national level, how well they do at providing developmentally appropriate learning environments that foster self-esteem and intellectual curiosity, where they have focused their professional development efforts and what sustained impact that has had on classroom practice by teachers....but I'm not interested in judging one school (or child) against another.