CONTACT Debra Marlow
Director, Community Relations
748-1433
May 20, 2008

For immediate release

Newsweek ranks four Chesterfield high schools among the country’s best

Four of the nation’s best high schools are located in Chesterfield County, according to a report in Newsweek.  James River (No. 205), Midlothian (457), Clover Hill (893) and Monacan (1,022) are among the top 5 percent of high schools in America, according to a Challenge Index that will be published in the weekly magazine’s May 26 edition.

James River is the highest-ranked school in the Richmond metropolitan area and was the 21st ranked school in Virginia. This is James River’s third consecutive year on the list. Midlothian and Clover Hill made the list for the fourth straight year, while Monacan made its first appearance.

The Challenge Index is created by adding the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Cambridge tests given at a school and dividing it by the number of graduating seniors. The index was created to identify schools doing the best job of preparing students for college. All schools on Newsweek’s 2008 list had a Challenge Index of 1.000 or higher, meaning that the school administered as many tests in 2007 as it had graduates. Nearly 27,000 public schools in the country were eligible for consideration.

“AP, IB and Cambridge are important because they give average students a chance to experience the trauma of heavy college reading lists and long, analytical college examinations,” wrote Newsweek contributor Jay Mathews, a Washington Post education reporter who developed the index. “Studies by U.S. Department of Education senior researcher Clifford Adelman in 1999 and 2005 showed that the best predictors of college graduation were not good high school grades and test scores, but whether or not a student had an intense academic experience in high school. Such experiences were produced by taking higher-level math and English courses and struggling with the demands of college-level courses like AP or IB.”

“To send a student off to college without having had an AP, IB or Cambridge course and test is like insisting that a child learn to ride a bike without ever taking off the training wheels until the day you send the kid out onto the city streets alone.”

Enrollment numbers in AP courses in Chesterfield County schools reached an all-time high during the 2006-07 school year with nearly 5,000 AP classes taken. That is an increase from 2,379 five years ago. The number of AP exams taken last year increased dramatically as well, from approximately 2,700 in 2005-06 to more than 5,100 in 2006-07. More than 50 percent of Chesterfield’s 2007 graduates who took an AP exam scored a 3 or better, enough to earn the student credit at most colleges.

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