It's good to see public high schools get some love, as they did in a recent Newsweek report. The top 1, 300 schools in the nation were ranked on such factors as the number of students taking and passing Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate and/or Cambridge tests, graduating seniors, and how many students receive federally subsidized meals.

Public schools, like colleges, deserve to be ranked. It's what most homebuyers want to know when they move to a new neighborhood -- what are the schools like?

This survey shows, the schools are what you make them.

Of the top 100 public high schools, 45 are magnet, TAG, or charter schools. Put another way, these are schools have special permission from their independent school districts to require higher work and behavioral standards of students, in order to attend.

One quarter of the students are receiving subsidized lunches, which means they are thriving in these schools, despite impoverished backgrounds.

"The data is clear," says Jay Mathews, author, founder of the index, and education reporter for the Washington Post, "These are all schools that believe all kids, particularly average and low income kids, can do well on AP and IB if given enough time and encouragement. It is an attitudinal and cultural difference, shared by most of the other 1350 on the list."

Sadly that is only 5 percent of U.S. public schools, he adds.

That means the rest are hostage to the cacophony of interruptions at the typical high school.

Lauren Callender, a substitute teacher in Blytheville Senior High School in Arkansas, was socked in the jaw recently while trying to break up a fight between two students. Later in the day, she witnessed a girl slap a boy for making a remark. "Will you guys just give me a break," she said to her class.

It used to be that punching and hitting was enough to get a kid expelled, but that's no longer true. No wonder it's so hard for kids to learn.

Research shows that the schools with the highest academic achievements are those with the strongest parental and community involvement.

That's why stories like this matter. We need to be reminded that there are kids all over the country who want to achieve, and there are thousands of schools that need help.

What we need is to put a TAG program in every school, not to remove the higher-performing kids from the building and put them in some rarefied setting. It's those kids who set the example and give other students achievement and behavior to emulate. If they're not around, they're not around to imitate.

We can do better, and the results of this survey prove it.

Published: May 22, 2008

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