From Trussville Tribune staff reports
TRUSSVILLE — America’s Most Challenging High Schools ranks schools through an index formula that’s a simple ratio: the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Advanced International Certificate of Education tests given at a school each year, divided by the number of seniors who graduated that year. A ratio of 1.000 means the school had as many tests as graduates.
Hewitt-Trussville High School ranked sixth in Alabama and among the top 1,200 schools in the country as most challenging.
According to index founder Jay Mathews, in 1998, the first year of the Challenge Index, only about one percent of U.S. schools qualified. The number this year is up to about 12 percent. In 2003, 94,539 students from low-income families took an AP exam. By 2016 that number had jumped to 554,584, a 487 percent increase.
The growth of AP and IB participation has also been fueled by selective college admissions offices using that as a measure of a student’s readiness for higher education. Many impoverished students have thrived in this atmosphere.
- Jefferson County IB
- Alabama School of Mathematics and Science
- Bob Jones
- Mountain Brook
- James Clemens
- Hewitt-Trussville
- Vestavia Hills
- Spain Park
- Buckhorn