Little Rock School District

        
  Central High School receives high marks in Newsweek ranking  
Central High School once more bears the weight of the national spotlight, but 50 years after the desegregation of this landmark school the focus is purely academic. Newsweek recently released its annual list of America’s top public high schools, and Central ranked 36 of the top 1,300 high schools in the nation. It was the highest ranking of all Arkansas high schools and one of only eight schools in the state to make the list.

There are approximately 27,000 public high schools in the United States, and this list includes only the top five percent.

Newsweek ranks the schools by a simple formula: how many Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB) and/or Cambridge exams are given at the school in the spring divided by the number of seniors graduating that spring. A score of 1.0 or higher, meaning that as many tests were administered at the school as they had graduates, warrants inclusion on the list. Central’s score was 4.774.

Some people question this methodology for ranking high schools, but Newsweek’s contributing editor Jay Mathews defends it, saying that AP, IB and Cambridge tests “are important because they give average students a chance to experience the trauma of heavy college reading lists and long, analytical college examinations.”