Is Basis Arizona’s best high school, or is Sunnyslope?

U. S. News and World Report deserves a C-minus, maybe a D, for its “Best High School” rankings. And those of us in the media who fawningly (and without question) reported its list deserve an F. Thankfully, however, there are those who look at such lists with knowledge and skepticism, like the good folks at the nonprofit Grand Canyon Institute. This week, the institute’s research director, Dave Wells, sent out a link to a blog on the institute’s website under the title “Sunnyslope High School, not BASIS, should get the headlines.”

According to U.S. News, five of the top high schools in the nation are Basis charter schools in Arizona, which occupy the top three spots as well as No. 5 and No. 7.

Make no mistake: These are really good schools. As the Grand Canyon Institute blog points out, “BASIS has a very rigorous curriculum designed for extremely high achieving students. BASIS does well because the ranking system is designed to reward schools that have a high-achieving student body and give lots of AP tests.”

But there are better criteria to define the “best” schools, such as the size and diversity of the student body, the economy of the district and the fact that a school like Sunnyslope really must welcome all students.

U.S. News says it takes such things into account, but I can’t imagine it is possible to get a clear apples-to-apples comparison.

For example, the top-rated schools from Arizona are in affluent communities. Not Sunnyslope.

As the Grand Canyon blog says, “Sunnyslope (ranked 21 in Arizona) is the outlier. It has more than twice as many students in 12th grade than the five Basis schools combined. Half its student body is economically disadvantaged.

“High Schools that serve a more academically diverse student body are going to be more challenged — and especially if they serve lower socio-economic status students.”

On the other hand, Basis schools serve “an extremely small fraction of very high achieving students — and have no Special Education students according to the Department of Education and no record of economically disadvantaged students.”

(Full disclosure — my son graduated from Sunnyslope several years back.)

Schools like ’Slope prove that the model for success in public education won’t be found in small, relatively exclusive academic enclaves like Basis, which reach (and only want to reach) a tiny percentage of our kids, but in schools like Sunnyslope, which deal with the reality of large, diverse student bodies within large, economically diverse urban school districts. And find ways to succeed.

I’m with the folks at the Grand Canyon Institute on this. We in the media blew it.

The headline about best schools should have begun with Sunnyslope.