The 2005 Newsweek Poll of Public High Schools:
Good News or Bad News for Alabama?

The most recent Newsweek poll of America's 27,468 public high schools paints a mixed picture of public education in Alabama. There is both good news and bad news in those poll results. Of course, the good news is very impressive. According to the poll, five Alabama public high schools are in the top 1,000 public high schools in the United States. Here are those Newsweek standings:
1. Jefferson County International Baccalaureate (JCIB), Irondale, Alabama
61. Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA), Birmingham, Alabama
213. Auburn High School, Auburn, Alabama
250. Mountain Brook High School, Mountain Brook, Alabama
644. Grissom High School, Huntsville, Alabama
That's right! JCIB, right out in Irondale, a suburb of Birmingham, on the same campus as Shades Valley High School, is the number one public high school in America, and all five of the Alabama schools are ranked higher than 98 percent of the public high schools in the nation. These rankings are truly very good news to the people of Alabama, but I gave you the good news first. Here's the really disturbing bad news. Alabama's population of 4.4 million represents approximately 1.5 percent of the U.S. population, so Alabama ought to have at least 1.5 percent of the top 1,000 public high schools if the superintendents and couselors and teachers and coaches who run our public high schools are doing a good enough job to get our fair share of schools on the top 1,000 list. In other words, if Alabama school officials were doing an average job on education as a whole, we would have about 15 schools in the top 1,000; and, if Alabama educational leaders were doing a better than average job, we would have perhaps 20 or 30 or even more truly top-flight public schools. Georgia, for example, has more than 40 public high schools on the top 1,000 list, and it is nice to say that Mississippi did not place any of their public high schools in the top 1,000; however, Alabama only has five public high schools in the whole state that are top flight schools. Sadly, five good schools in the whole state is nowhere near even an average level of quality. Five schools? Five? Average is fifteen! We can't get more than five? Where I learned my fractions 5/15 is only 33.3%, and that's an "F." Of course it's fun to finally be able to brag about some really good things in Alabama's public education system, but the 2005 Newsweek poll of America's public high schools is clearly not all good news for Alabama. Indeed, that poll really shows just how far below average we really are.
This paragraph is an example of a Stage Two one-paragraph essay. The topic sentence and the re-worded topic sentence are printed in green. The sub-topic sentences are printed in blue.

Please note that there are a handful of really good private and parochial schools in Alabama. St. Paul's (Mobile), UMS (Mobile), McGill-Toolen (Mobile), Marion Military Institute (Greene County, Alabama), John Carroll Catholic High School (Birmingham), Indian Springs School (Birmingham), Altamont School (Birmingham), Briarwood Christian School (Birmingham), Highlands Day School (Birmingham), and a few others are first-rate non-public schools, but Alabama is too economically deprived to have enough wealthy or upper-middle-class people to support 50 or 60 such schools. . .the way that Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia do.

Also note that the Newsweek poll is far more reliable than most magazine and newspaper polls. The "experts" who participate in the poll are asked to consider such factors as the following in making their rankings:

a. average ACT and SAT scores of most recent graduating class;
b. average amount of non-athletic scholarship funds earned by the most recent graduating class (for example, JCIB's graduating class of 65 seniors earned $2.2 million in non-athletic scholarships, and that's an average of $33,846 per graduating senior);
b. percentage of graduating seniors accepted by accredited universities and colleges;
c. average scores of graduating seniors taking the advanced placement tests to receive college credit for courses like English, math,history, foreign languages, and other strictly academic courses;
d. percentage of graduates accepted by Ivy League schools and U.S. military service academies such as West Point and Annapolis;
e. the percentage of students who graduate compared to the percentage of students who leave the school for any reason; and
f. intangible factors such as famous graduates or famous faculty members, a top-flight extra-curricular program such as drama, American Institute of Physics, Who's Who in American High Schools, choral singing, orchestra, or policy debate;
g. any other singular achievement that is academic in nature.