Fairfax County, Virginia. Only here do I encounter a girl (who complained that the pool to her Florida beach house was too small) expressing outrage that West Springfield is a low-ranking school. Her rationale? Newsweek placed us 141st nationwide. That’s low only in the minds of us in Fairfax County. For curiosity’s sake, here are all of Fairfax’s schools and how they fared.

34 Woodson
50 Langley
84 Robinson
94 Chantilly
102 Madison
103 Oakton
108 Lake Braddock
126 Westfield
128 McLean
141 West Springfield
149 Centreville
174 Herndon
187 Mashall
196 Fairfax
222 Hayfield
289 Falls Church
371 Stuart
403 West Potomac
524 Annandale
549 Lee
707 Edison
746 Mt. Vernon

Normal people would look at the fact all of Fairfax’s eligible high schools (South County is left off the list because they have no graduating seniors, Thomas Jefferson High School For People Who Are Too Damn Smart For Their Own Good is left off because they have a “selective admissions process”, which is best known for rejecting me.) and gasp in awe. Fairfax County residents look at this list and conclude:

Duuuude….[Lee/Annadale/Edison/Mt. Vernon] is soooo ghetto….

Admit it.

Now this, of course, brings up at West Springfield great umbrage, for they placed Lake Braddock and Robinson above us. There is a slight problem with Newsweek’s methodology, though. Their formula is to take AP tests taken and divide it by the number of graduating seniors.

That way, if you force every student in the building to, say, take the AP Calculus BC and AP Music Theory exams, and had a good number of seniors not graduating, your ranking would be extroadinarily high, in spite of the fact that most everyone will fail AP Calc BC and find out they can’t read alto clef.

Most people can’t muck around correctly with differential equations and stare blankly at the problems on the AP Calculus BC exam (math people that good end up at TJ) or read alto clef and tell you what a pedal tone is on AP Music Theory (violists who can do that are few and far between), but just because they took the exam, their school looks good. Is that really a good school to you?

I am miffed by efforts to quantify an education. Numbers don’t mean anything. If education was just for numbers, we would adopt an approach akin to force-feeding knowledge down student’s throat. Education is there to teach students how to think independently. Quantifying their test-question regurgitation skills is nothing more than a creative PR exercise.

Grades and Newsweek’s formula are similarly useless. When it comes to grades and class rank, you get a piece of paper with some letters on it that predetermine your future. If you were unlucky enough to end up in a tough school district or a school with loads of smart people, you get buried. You can graduate with a 4.0 and at the top of the class at West Podunk High School in the middle of nowhere, and say you’re smart, but comparing grades is comparing apples to oranges.

Newsweek, though, knows how to sell its magazines: inciting anger.