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Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Research into the Comparision of Gifted Schools Nationally

As you may know, I've been doing a project regarding diversity at Pine View. The key part of my project to increase diversity would be to modify the enrollment system in a way where every child is given an equal chance to apply. This means finding the key point in the current application process which results in a smaller pool of African American students passing than any other ethnicity. An article I read pointed out that in the current system at Pine View, only 1 in 50 black students pass compared to an average of 1 in 7 white students. This is what raised my doubt in the current system and it is what I believe may attribute to the diversification of Pine View if fixed correctly.

Another key realization I made was the fact that Pine View is not nearly the only school in the US who has this problem. Several of the nation's top filtered or "gifted" schools have issues with diversity. This is valuable information because being able to pinpoint common ground among all these schools would be crucial to identifying the root of the problem in our own community and how to solve it.

I also created a diversity scoring tool which compares the demographic percentages of minority groups in a school and compares them to the county. The closer the demographics of the school are to the county in the minority groups, the better the diversity score is. The score ranges between 0-100, however neither 0 nor 100 will ever truly be reached. Those numbers identify the ideal diversity where the demographics exactly match that of the county to the person. I will further explain the algorithm of this calculator in another article.

However this calculator is important in the process I took in organizing the list I created of the top 50 high schools in the nation, with a similar application process as Pine View, according to US News being ranked by my diversity grader. I have posted the chart below:

School Name District/County of School Ranking US News Ranking Diversity Score
Young Women's Preparatory Academy
Miami-Dade County Public Schools
1 52 96.60
Jericho Senior High School Jericho Union Free School District 2 67 96.10
School Without Walls High School District Of Columbia Public Schools 3 84 93.20
Whitney High School ABC Unified School District 4 14 92.20
Design and Architecture Senior High Miami-Dade County Public Schools 5 22 89.60
Hawthorne Math and Science Academy Hawthorne School District 6 66 88.00
University High School (Tolleson) Tolleson Union High School District 7 21 87.90
Lowell High School San Francisco Unified School District 8 59 87.10
Preuss School UCSD San Diego Unified School District 9 54 82.10
Rye High School Rye City School District 10 90 80.90
School of Science and Engineering Dallas Independent School District 11 9 79.90
International Studies Preparatory Academy Miami-Dade County Public Schools 12 30 78.60
International School Bellevue School District 13 41 78.60
DSST: Stapleton High School Denver Public Schools 14 97 76.60
Gilbert Classical Academy High School Gilbert Unified District 15 29 70.80
Suncoast Community High School School District of Palm Beach County 16 53 70.50
Booker T. Washington SPVA Dallas Independent School District 17 92 66.80
Peak to Peak CHARTER School Boulder Valley School District  18 33 63.90
Hume Fogg Magnet High School Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools 19 58 63.60
University High School(Tucson) Tucson Unified District 20 15 63.50
Walnut Hills High School Cincinnati Public Schools 21 47 63.30
Dr. Ronald E McNair High School Jersey City Public Schools 22 49 63.30
Alexander W. Dreyfoos Junior School of the Arts School District of Palm Beach County 23 78 62.50
Benjamin Franklin High School New Orleans Public Schools 24 70 62.10
Philip J. Weaver Ed Center Guilford County Schools 25 39 61.10
Mission San Jose High Fremont Unified 26 76 61.00
Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology Gwinnett County 27 34 60.00
IDEA Frontier College Preparatory IDEA Public Schools 28 55 60.00
Walter Payton College Preparatory High School Chicago Public Schools 29 64 60.00
Edgewood Jr/Sr High School Brevard Public Schools 30 50 59.70
Westshore Junior/Senior High School Brevard Public Schools 31 31 59.00
Tesla STEM High School Lake Washington School District 32 28 57.30
Carnegie Vanguard High School Houston Independent School District 33 8 56.90
Northside College Preparatory High School Chicago Public Schools 34 40 54.50
DeBakey High School for Health Professions Houston Independent School District 35 18 53.70
Stanton College Preparatory School Duval County Public Schools 36 36 53.10
School for the Talented and the Gifted Dallas Independent School District 37 4 49.80
International Community School Lake Washington School District 38 80 49.70
Julia R. Masterman Secondary School School District of Philadelphia 39 51 48.00
Pine View School Sarasota County Schools 40 13 45.60
Loveless Academic Magnet Program High School Montgomery County 41 57 43.60
Boston Latin School Boston Public Schools 42 42 41.80
Central Magnet School Rutherford County 43 37 40.30
Oxford Academy Anaheim Union High 44 12 36.80
Early College at Guilford Guilford County Schools 45 62 27.80
Thomas Jefferson School for Science and Technology Fairfax County Public Schools 46 6 27.20
Liberal Arts and Science Academy Austin Independent School District 47 27 23.90
Academic Magnet High School Charleston County School District 48 11 20.70
Bronx High School of Science New York City Public Schools-District 10 49 46 17.40
High Technology High School Monmouth County Vocational School District 50 16 6.50

*Note: The scores in this table should be only taken to 2 significant figures and are only rough estimates using diversity data from Niche.com

Although several of the schools on this list have a ranking on US News well above the top 50, the reason for this is that I had to actually take the top 100 high schools and identify 50 that had an application process similar to that of Pine View. This also led to the decision of removing all the New York City schools whose application process for their schools is very different from the Pine View. I will also attach the original document of the scores that all the top 100 got that I calculated with the scorer.

My plan after this is to separately explore the processes in applying to each of these schools much more thoroughly. Then, by comparing them al to one another, I will hopefully be able to find something that each of them share. This process will be for another article however. I encourage you to look out for it, because it will be critical in taking the next step towards a more diverse future for Pine View and possibly other schools facing the same problem around the nation.

Link to document of Top 100 ranked using diversity calculator:
https://1drv.ms/x/s!AuU8iPdfWb_dmXrgH7BY4POaWTkI

*Note: Many charter schools in the top 100 were not able to be scored due to not being able to find diversity data of their surrounding counties

-VCK

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