PHS makes national list

PALMER — Students arriving for the first day of school at Palmer High School had one more thing of which to be proud — the school’s placement on a national magazine’s list of top high schools in the country.

Palmer High was the only Alaska school to make the list.

“It’s awesome. I’m very pleased, very proud,” Principal Wolfgang Winter said. “It speaks volumes about the quality of the staff and the quality of the students here, and obviously about the community that sends us these students.”

Each year Newsweek puts out its list, based on a very simple formula. The magazine divides the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests given at the school in the year by the number of seniors graduating that summer. If that ratio is larger than 1, the school makes the list.

Which means the size of the list changes from year to year. Schools that aren’t on the list are invited to submit their statistics. So the 2010 list is constantly growing. When it was first published in June, it was just over 1,600 names long. Now it’s past 1,700. Palmer ranks 1,689.

But Jay Matthews, who compiled the list, said schools shouldn’t pay attention to those rankings— they’re more a way to draw attention to the issue of school quality than anything. He notes that every school on the list is in the top 6 percent of schools nationwide.

Winter said the process of making the list wasn’t a terribly time-consuming one. An e-mail showed up one day last year soliciting statistics and he sent them in. He said he couldn’t speak to the lack of other Alaska schools on that list.

“I don’t know if they applied,” he said, or if they would have made the list if they had.

But he’s glad he applied.

“It’s a nice way to recognize the hard work that the students and the staff do,” Winter said.

As to whether Palmer will remain on that list, Winter said that’s tough to predict. The rankings were based on the 2008-09 school year. A lot of Palmer’s numbers come from its International Baccalaureate program.

“I know our numbers were smaller this past year than the previous year,” he said of that program. “I’m going to fill out the data form and see where it leads us.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.

To see Palmer’s ranking on Newsweek’s list of top high schools, follow this link: newsweek.com/tag/americas-best-high-schools.html