By Isaac Guttman, ’10, News Editor, and Will Portman, ’10, Editor-in-Chief
Two editors from Cincinnati Magazine who visited school two weeks ago said they stood by their decision not to include CCDS in a cover story on the region’s best high schools published last fall, though they said the school would be “in the running” if they were to generate their list again.
Editor Jay Stowe and Deputy Editor Amanda Boyd Walters, who wrote the high schools article, visited CCDS on Thursday, Jan. 14, touring campus with Head of School Dr. Robert Macrae and sitting for a 30-minute interview with The Scroll.
Their visit was arranged by Gibson Carey, former President of the Board of Trustees, father of Senior Dean of Students Fred Carey, ’80, and grandfather of Katie, ’20, and Ellie, ’22. Carey arranged the visit in response to the magazine’s Nov. 2009 “Best High Schools” issue – described by the magazine as a “cheat sheet” for “figuring out which one’s right for your child” – which featured 30 local schools but omitted CCDS.
“I know Cincinnati Magazine to be a very responsible publication and was puzzled by how there could be such a significant oversight with regard to CCDS,” said Carey. “So I asked for a meeting with the publisher and the writer of the article. I was warmly welcomed.”
Carey invited Stowe and Walters to visit campus – an invitation, he said, they “readily accepted.”
Following an approximately hour-long tour, Stowe, the editor, remarked that CCDS “strikes me as much more like a college, in the sense that there’s an openness to it and a sort of freedom … Whether they’re Lower School kids or in high school, [the students] think independently. It’s not always easy to do, but it seems to me that the school’s kind of set up in that way. And then obviously the facilities are very cool.”
However, pressed later if, after touring the school, he would include CCDS in a list of the top 30 area high schools, Stowe said, “I don’t know. I think that it would definitely be in the running … I can’t say. I wouldn’t change what we’ve done, you know, it’s out there.”
Methodology
While the front cover of Cincinnati Magazine’s Nov. 2009 issue reads “Best High Schools,” the official title of the article on schools is “Multiple Choice.”
The first paragraph contains a disclaimer: “While all these schools are very good in a number of ways, they are not the only good schools out there. And just because a school is rated excellent or is academically strong, it may not necessarily be the right school.”
“It doesn’t mean that the school’s not on the list because it [stinks],” said Walters, the article’s writer. “That’s not the intention at all … The way we did it this year was to attempt to identify schools that have extremely outstanding programs in particular areas and to identify schools that are excellent overall.”
Featured schools are grouped into six categories of five schools each: Science and Technology, Special Education, General Excellence, Language Arts, Athletics, and Fine and Performing Arts.
Each school profile provides basic data like the number of students enrolled, student-teacher ratio, and mean ACT score, but hinges primarily on a short paragraph describing the school’s strengths.
“We made a decision that we would not be writing about a school more than once,” said Stowe. “There are schools, in fact, that could probably place in all of these five categories.”
However, the article does not state that a school could only be featured in one category.
The process of selecting schools “was not a scientific measure,” according to Walters.
“It was much more about looking at the national recognition that schools have gotten, the U.S. News and World Report listing, and the Newsweek listing,” she said. “We talked to local colleges and universities, their admissions people … We talked to educational consultants to kind of get an idea of what parents are interested in.”
CCDS Director of College Counseling Sarah Beyreis said that given the magazine’s methodology, she was surprised CCDS was not included in the article.
“In conversations over the past five years, college reps and deans have often told me that Cincinnati Country Day is one of the very strongest schools in Cincinnati,” said Beyreis.
Walters and Stowe admitted that the school selections were “not perfect” and that they were “opened up to subjectivity.”
Additionally, they acknowledged that the magazine took into account a school’s location and status as a public or private institution in determining whether or not to include it.
“We tried to make sure that we had the best mix possible of schools in this area, because we are trying to serve a large readership in this area,” said Walters.
Public and private schools were evaluated, a departure from an August 2007 article in the magazine entitled “Best Private High Schools,” which focused solely on local independent and parochial schools. CCDS was ranked 11th in that article, which employed a mathematical formula for deriving numerical rankings of 36 local high schools.
The 2007 rankings were developed by Dr. I. Elaine Allen, a statistics professor at Babson College in Wellesley, MA, whose primary experience is in health care analysis. Cincinnati Magazine sent Dr. Allen data for local private schools, such as the number of AP classes and extracurricular activities offered at a school, the student-teacher ratio, and the percentage of teachers with advanced degrees, and she compiled the rankings.
This strictly quantitative approach to education analysis triggered criticism from many local schools. Ohio Association of Independent Schools Executive Director Karin O’Neill called Stowe to discuss her concerns with the methodology.
Walters said the 2007 rankings “were what they were … we took the data that was there and we said this is how we did it.”
Later, however, Walters conceded that while the criteria used to evaluate schools, such as “number of extracurriculars” and “student-teacher ratio,” were released, the formula used to derive the rankings – the relative importance of each bit of criteria – was never made public.
Stowe said the shift from 2007’s strictly quantitative approach to 2009’s more qualitative methodology, which he described as “a much more organic route,” was “in some degree” a response to criticism the magazine received after the 2007 rankings were published.
Walters, discussing why qualitative factors, like a school’s reputation among education consultants, were the primary basis for a school’s selection for the 2009 article, said, “Choosing a high school is a really personal decision and depends on an array of other factors … Just because a school ranks really high, whether it’s the experience of the faculty or other programs the school has, if your kid is not going to respond to those things, then it doesn’t really matter.”
Ben Fischer, an education reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer specializing in Cincinnati Public Schools, said of school rankings in general, “it’s highly dubious to list schools as being precisely ‘the Nth best school’ in the region or whatnot.”
His colleague, Krista Ramsey, a columnist for the Enquirer who covers education, agreed, saying, “I’m disturbed over the general trend toward ranking everything … Such rankings put everyone (especially parents) on the hunt for the perfect choice, rather than the right fit for the student.”
Fischer praised Cincinnati Magazine’s 2009 high school article for “avoid[ing] a major flaw: ranking [schools] numerically.”
“I don’t think Cincinnati Magazine is doing the community any real harm, although I’d take it with a huge grain of salt if I were a reader sincerely interested in finding the right school for my child,” said Fischer.
Asked why CCDS, as well as two other prominent local schools, Ursuline Academy and Summit Country Day School, were not included in the rankings, Walters said that the list was not “exclusionary;” that it wasn’t a school’s weaknesses that kept it off the list, but rather the strengths of the schools that were in the article.
“To make a little bit of a cop out,” said Stowe, “there was a space issue, meaning we only have a certain amount of space in the hard copy to fit a certain number schools.”
In addition to lack of space, Stowe cited a lack of reporters, saying, “I think that if we did it right, we’d have public and private rankings … there’s only so many reporters, only so many staffers, and so much time, so that would be too much for us to do.”
“Best” Title?
One source of criticism is the headline on the cover of the magazine: “Best High Schools.” While this wasn’t technically the title of the article, it was much more visible than the actual title, “Multiple Choice.”
“Best High Schools” could be found on the magazine’s Facebook page, where featured schools were encouraged to download a “Best High Schools 2009/Presented by Cincinnati Magazine” logo to “include on [their] own website, newsletter, alumni publication, Facebook page, college admissions materials, etc.”
Ursuline Academy Director of Communications Robin Galvin took issue with the label “Best High Schools.”
“We were naturally disappointed that Ursuline was not mentioned in the article, and there would have been no problem at all had the article not been titled ‘Best High Schools,’” Galvin said. “Each school in the article had an outstanding program to commend it, no doubt, but in focusing on those specific attributes, some great overall schools were omitted.”
CCDS Director of Admissions Aaron Kellenberger said he thought, “a better masthead for the article would have been ‘Multiple Choice,’ which was the introduction to the article, rather than ‘Best High Schools.’ If you look closely at the rankings, you will see that they made great attempts to include both public and private, big and small, and Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky schools in each of their ‘best’ lists, regardless of truly choosing the ‘best’ schools in those categories.”
Lisa Woodall, a Cincinnati Magazine reader from Indian Hill, submitted a letter to the editor which read, “Absent real objective methodology yielding publishable data for determining the list, perhaps [the article] would be more appropriately titled, ‘30 Area High Schools Where Good Things Are Happening,’ or ‘30 Area High Schools We Thought You Might Like to Learn More About.’ It is not as simple or catchy as ‘Best High Schools,’ but certainly more accurate.”
Walters said some schools were selected for the article because “they are doing things that are more interesting, that are highlight-worthy,” not necessarily because they were deemed the overall best.
“The schools we ended up choosing, in part, were because, with all the reporting we did, we found, here was one we think is interesting,” said Stowe.
Kellenberger pointed out that CCDS was mentioned in the introduction to the category “General Excellence.” The category, which featured Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy, Seven Hills, Indian Hill, Highlands, and Beechwood High Schools, contained an introduction which read, “Though they’re not the only 800-pound gorillas in the educational market (we see you, Mason, St. X, Walnut Hills, Cincinnati Country Day, et. al.), these schools do almost everything right.”
“You Can Disagree”
Stowe said of selecting which schools to feature, “ultimately it’s our decision. Obviously you can disagree with that, and that’s fine. But it’s not to say that we made a mistake, necessarily.”
Ben Fischer took issue with Cincinnati Magazine’s decision to include Hughes STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) High School in the “Science and Technology” category.
“The Hughes STEM school is certainly promising and intriguing, but it literally just opened in August,” said Fischer. “They’re four years away from graduating anybody, and students there have yet to take a single standardized test. I don’t see how you can possibly draw any legitimate conclusions about the quality of that school in November, as promising as it is.”
Additionally, the magazine seemed to base some of its reasoning on generalizations.
For example, it included Madeira High School in the “Language Arts” category, providing as primary justification for its inclusion an anecdote about an admissions representative at Indiana University who “remembered [the] strong application essay” of a Madeira student. Cincinnati Magazine’s conclusion: “so yes, Madeira writers are that good.”
Although the article evaluated both private and public schools, the magazine used scores on state report cards (both Ohio’s and Kentucky’s) and spots on Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report high school rankings, all of which only public schools are eligible to receive, as support for certain schools’ inclusion in the article.
Advertising
In the Nov. 2009 issue, over 15 local independent and parochial schools took out advertisements in Cincinnati Magazine, including CCDS, Summit, CHCA, and Seven Hills.
“CCDS does advertise in Cincinnati Magazine as we have in the past,” said Aaron Kellenberger. “We probably will in the future. Having a continual presence … is important today and tomorrow regardless of the content.”
Ursuline Academy did not have an ad in the issue.
“We have [advertised] from time to time,” said Robin Galvin. “It is unlikely that we will in the future, not because of [the “Best High Schools” issue], but because we are examining how we spend our finite marketing dollars in an era when fewer and fewer people are reading newspapers or magazines.”
Stowe said he didn’t consider it a conflict of interest to report on subjects with which the magazine holds advertising contracts.
“We operate on a church-state solution, ad sales-wise. They don’t know what we’re writing until essentially the night before we print,” he said.
“Without the ads, we wouldn’t even have a magazine,” he added.
Asked why its readers should trust that Cincinnati Magazine doesn’t grant preferential treatment to subjects with which it engages in business, Stowe said, “All I can tell you is that any time anybody asks this, this is what we say … We operate separately from our business side. They’re not allowed to interfere with what we do.”
Impact
Stowe said the magazine’s goal with the “Best High Schools” issue was to inform its readers about local education options.
“We hope that what we’re doing is at least providing information to our readers that’s helpful to them, especially if it’s families with kids that are thinking about high school,” said Stowe.
But how big of an impact does the article, or one like it, truly have? Do parents use it to determine where to send their kids to school?
“Undoubtedly some do,” said Robin Galvin, “but it’s a pretty cold way to make such an important decision … We have no verifiable data to back this up, but we would imagine the number of parents who made a decision on the education of their children based on this Cincinnati Magazine article is negligible, to say the least.”
Kellenberger said CCDS experienced a surge in enrollment after receiving what the school considered to be a low ranking – 11th out of 36 – in the August 2007 private high schools article.
“Did it affect our current enrollment? No,” he said. “That was our best enrollment year in the past few years, with 159 new students enrolling in the school,” he said. “The 2010 recruitment year is looking much like the 2007-2008 year … Inquiries and applications are higher this year than they have been in the past three-plus years.”
Ben Fischer and Krista Ramsey encouraged families not to base high school decisions off the article.
“I should hope that parents only give very limited credence to ratings developed by a general-interest news/lifestyle publication. That would go the same for anything The Cincinnati Enquirer might publish,” said Fischer. “Parents and children need to do a hell of a lot more work than reading a newspaper or a magazine to find the right school.”
“The better way to evaluate a school or college is to visit, talk to current students and alumni, and determine the factors that mean the most to you,” said Ramsey.
Photo courtesy of Cincinnati Magazine.