Newsweek Honors Cherry Hill, Haddonfield High Schools

Courier Post
Barbara Rothschild
June 21, 2010

Three South Jersey schools are included in Newsweek magazine's list of top high schools in the nation.

Haddonfield High School and both Cherry Hill High School West and East appear on the magazine's list of America's Best High Schools 2010, now available on Newsweek's website.

The list includes 1,623 high schools across the country and is based on how hard school staffs work to challenge students with Advanced Placement and similar college-level courses and tests.

According to Newsweek, 6 percent of the nation's approximately 27,000 public schools made the list.

Rankings were calculated using an index ranking achieved by taking the total number of Advanced Placement tests, International Baccalaureate exams and/or a third little-utilized exam known as the Cambridge tests given at a school each year and dividing that figure by the number of seniors graduating that spring. To appear on the list, schools had to achieve a ratio of at least 1.000, meaning they had as many tests taken by members of the Class of 2009 as they had graduates.

Each list is based on the previous year's data, so the 2010 list has numbers for 2009. The 1.000 index can be achieved if half the students at a school take one AP test during their junior year and another one in their senior year, for example.

In this year's list, Haddonfield came in at 1,022 with an index of 1.574. Cherry Hill West was ranked 1,441 with a 1.164 index and Cherry Hill East was ranked 1,559 with an index of 1.058.

"It's purely a numbers game," said Cherry Hill High School West Principal Joe Meloche.

"In one sense, it's very nice to be ranked there in the top 6 percent of all high schools. But it also depends on what people do with the numbers. It's a very tough comparison and you want to use those numbers in a positive sense."

Cherry Hill West and East have made the list in the two previous years and were ranked higher in those years because Newsweek changed its calculations this year, Meloche said.

Still, he is pleased with the results.

"It's a nod to the type of kid we educate. We have made a concerted effort to increase enrollment in our most rigorous classes, and AP as an indicator always ranks up high."

Officials from Cherry Hill East and Haddonfield Memorial were unavailable for comment Friday, as were administrators from Moorestown High School and Eastern High School in Voorhees, among the region's other high-performing schools.

Meloche said it's possible those schools don't offer as many AP courses or that they chose not to participate with Newsweek. The magazine attempts to identify every high school in the nation. But because there is no national database with the number of AP, IB, and Cambridge tests and number of graduates for public high schools, the schools must submit their statistics to Newsweek.

On its website, Newsweek invites all qualifying schools it may have missed to e-mail its data so the magazine can put them on the list. As new data come in, they can affect the current rankings.

Newsweek uses the number of tests taken for its index rather than the scores received -- 3, 4 or 5 is considered passing on the AP test -- to avoid rates being kept artificially high at high schools that allow only top students to take AP courses or encourage only the best students to take the tests.

In its online explanation of why the magazine favors advanced subject tests as its criterion for ranking high schools, Newsweek editors say "they give average students a chance to experience the trauma of heavy college reading lists and long, analytical college examinations."

They liken sending a student to college without taking one of these courses and tests to "insisting that a child learn to ride a bike without ever taking off the training wheels."

This year's Newsweek list includes a new statistic developed by the College Board that indicates how well students are doing on the exams at each school while still recognizing the importance of increasing student participation.