Election-year battles over school choice rage on. But the debate has missed some key developments. Few voters realize, for instance, how much the rise of public charter schools has revolutionized what children are taught in some poor neighborhoods.
Charters make up 8 percent of all public schools. They receive government funding but are independent of local school systems. That has led some of them to pursue unusually ambitious learning goals, particularly with high school students.
In 1998, just as the charter movement began, I published my first rankings of high schools that participate in college-level Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge programs. I counted the total number of AP, IB or Cambridge final exams given at each school and divided by the total number of graduates that year. I dubbed it the Challenge Index.
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The 20 schools with the highest ratios that year were almost all regular public schools in affluent neighborhoods, such as Scarsdale High in New York, Indian Hill High in Ohio and Stevenson High in Illinois.
Twenty-five years later, in my most recent list of all Challenge Index qualifying schools in 2023, that top 20 group had been utterly transformed. The most challenging schools in the country are now mostly charters serving low-income students, like IDEA McAllen near the Texas-Mexico border or KIPP University Prep in San Antonio.
It is the biggest sea change in high schools I have ever seen. Why are so many of the most demanding charters now the ones located in impoverished areas? Why are so many of these students able to handle tough courses like AP, IB and Cambridge without well-educated, affluent parents?
It turns out that charters’ freedom to offer hard courses to anyone has led to hope and excitement among families and teachers in a growing number of low-income neighborhoods through increased use of AP, IB and Cambridge programs, which push such children much harder than they are used to.
Examine my 2024 Challenge Index list, just published, by clicking here.
This list looks just at charter high schools, ranked by the number of AP, IB and Cambridge final exams divided by the number of graduating seniors so that big schools don’t have an advantage over small ones. There are 141 charters that give enough college-level final exams to make the list. Of that total, 101 have a majority of students from low-income families.
There are still plenty of mediocre charter high schools in America, but the schools on this list are special and deserve more attention.
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The upper rungs on the charters-only list are now dominated by a single charter network called IDEA, which has 11 of the 20 top spots. Few Americans have ever heard of IDEA. It has 143 schools and more than 80,000 students in all grades, mostly in Texas.
The founders of IDEA, JoAnn Gama and Tom Torkelson, met in 1997 when they joined the Teach for America program to work at Moye Elementary School in Donna, Tex., a few miles from the Mexican border.
Both were 20-somethings mesmerized by a demanding approach to teaching low-income children called KIPP. They learned about it from KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg when he gave an evening talk to Teach for America volunteers in Donna.
Gama and Torkelson got permission to try their own KIPP-like IDEA program at Moye in their second year. They added middle schools and high schools and proved to be extraordinary organizers. By 2020 they had built a network in Texas that had 120 schools with 65,000 students in all grades.
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IDEA was so attractive to parents and teachers that it continued to thrive even after a crisis led Torkelson and Gama to resign. Teacher union and press critics complained that the two founders were spending too much money on leasing airplanes and apartments as part of the rapid growth. Torkelson and Gama secured financial settlements from IDEA and left, although they retained their reputations as experts on improving schools.
IDEA has joined KIPP, Uncommon and a few other charter networks in achieving surprising success raising achievement for low-income students through college-level courses, energetic teaching and longer hours.
A veteran charter educator who knows IDEA well has told me he thinks that the network’s success is a result of a top-down strategy that tells teachers exactly what to do in every minute of the school day. That has improved state test scores for its impoverished children, he said, but more needs to be done.
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To get on any of my Challenge Index lists, a school must have a ratio of the number of college-level final exams to the number of graduating seniors that is at or above 1.000. Many schools go much further. On my new list, 38 high schools have ratios above the 10.000 level, meaning if a school had 100 graduating seniors that year then it gave more than 1,000 AP, IB or Cambridge final exams to all students.
Teachers and parents in these schools have no problem with students taking two, three or even more college-level courses every year. On my first list in 1998, the top three schools in the country — a Florida magnet and two public schools in affluent suburban New York neighborhoods — had Challenge Index ratios of only 4.090, 2.903 and 2.862, respectively.
Students and parents at the most ambitious charters tell me they love the freedom to go beyond standard high school fare. Teachers at such schools say most districts fail to appreciate that children in poor neighborhoods, like all children, learn more from demanding classes than from easy ones.
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Mike Taubman, a veteran AP English instructor and an administrator at the Uncommon Schools charter network, said, “I’ve seen how a rigorous curriculum that leads to productive struggle can be a powerful driver of academic and personal growth.”
Many educators find it hard to believe, if they haven’t seen it with their own eyes, that giving AP, IB or Cambridge exams to children whose parents never went to college makes them better prepared for the universities that those kids dream of attending. Teachers who don’t push low-income or average students to do AP or IB often say such kids aren’t up to it, but the experiences of charters on my list indicate otherwise.
The final exams in those college-level courses are much tougher than the usual one-hour high school finals. Most of the time they are at least three hours long. Students must answer free-response questions rather than just mark the correct multiple-choice answers.
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It is important to know that AP, IB and Cambridge exams are neither written nor graded by students’ classroom teachers. The children taking such exams don’t know the exam graders, and the graders don’t know them. Parents who don’t like the results have no way of tracking down those pushy graders and telling them to ease up.
Teachers, parents and students at schools devoted to college-level courses tell me that struggling with the material is essential to learning. They want students to be able to do the hard stuff. That explains in part why there are so many more challenging schools in unexpected places now than when I started looking for them 26 years ago.
