Although George Mason High School fell to 23^rd place this year in Newsweek magazine’s annually-compiled list of the nation’s top 1,000 public schools, school officials are still very confident about the level of quality and difficulty in a GMHS education and have made several conclusions about what caused the drop in the rankings.

The nationally recognized list, which appeared in the May 16 issue of Newsweek, is the brainchild of Jay Mathews, an education reporter for The Washington Post. Mathews’s system is based on the reasoning that a more challenging school equates to a better school. The Challenge Index is based on the school’s ratio which is determined by dividing the total number of IB or AP exams taken by all students by the number of graduating seniors. Public schools with extremely strict admissions requirements, such as most magnet schools, are not included in the rankings.

Jefferson County IB High School in Irondale, Alabama (which consists solely of students involved in the IB Diploma Program) topped the list for 2004 with a challenge index of 10.755. GM’s latest ratio was 4.098 and ranked 23^rd. This challenge ratio is actually higher than it was five years ago, when GM ranked #2 on the Newsweek list with a rating of 3.743, although it is a drop from 2003, when GM ranked 6^th with a rating of 4.365. In the last seven years, George Mason has stayed within the top six public schools in similar rankings in The Washington Post Magazine. And although not completely consistently, GM’s challenge ratio has also been steadily increasing during that time.

Principal Bob Snee was confident that George Mason has consistently challenged its students over the years, regardless of the school’s ranking on this particular scale. He also noted that more and more schools are offering IB and AP classes, which is good for American education in general, even if the expanding number may keep GM from the top of the list.

"Our relative movement over the years in the index indicates that other schools are waking up to offering more challenging courses," Principal Snee said.

Principal Snee stressed that Mathews’s ratio does not in any way take into account how successful the students are on their IB and/or AP exams, but merely how well the school follows through with offering, teaching, and testing advanced classes. "(The ratio) has validity in that he (Mathews) does not tout this to be anything except a measure of how our schools are challenging our students with rigorous classes," he said.

Brian Dickson, the IB coordinator at GM, agreed with Snee’s assessment of the list. He had his own doubts about a ratio measuring "participation, not quality," and noted that some schools’ high ratios probably meant that many students were taking both IB and AP exams for the same classes, a practice not done at GM.

Mr. Dickson said that "student groups are like wine" in that their make-up fluctuates each year. He predicted that the GMHS classes of ’05, ’06, and ’07 could possibly increase the ranking in the coming years due to very heavy participation in the IB program. He admitted, however, that if additional schools begin offering IB and AP courses, GM’s position on the list could continue to fluctuate, even if the challenge ratio remains constant, as it usually has.