10 city high schools make national list of “most challenging”

The Washington Post’s annual ranking of high schools where students take challenging courses includes 10 operated by New York City.

The Baccalaureate School for Global Education in Queens, which offers the International Baccalaureate curriculum, is the top-rated city school on the list, produced annually by the Washington Post. Most, but not all, of the city schools on the list screen their students for academic aptitude.

The newspaper rates schools by the ratio of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams taken to graduates, adjusted slightly for their proportion of low-income students — a controversial formula that critics say does not provide an accurate measure of whether schools are challenging. Indeed, the city has many high schools with college-level curriculums that do not rely on the AP program, and those schools are not rated.

Here are the 10 city public schools on the list of “America’s most challenging high schools”:

Baccalaureate School for Global Education in Queens Brooklyn Latin School in Brooklyn Townsend Harris High School in Queens New Explorations in Science, Math, and Technology in Manhattan Knowledge and Power Prep International in the Bronx Academy of American Studies in Queens Leon M. Goldstein High School for the Sciences in Brooklyn Benjamin Cardozo High School in Queens Curtis High School on Staten Island The High School for Enterprise, Business, and Technology in Brooklyn

The city schools are among 126 schools across New York State and 1,900 schools nationally to make the list. A handful of private schools in New York City were ranked.

More city schools could land on the list in the future: The city is working to expand Advanced Placement offerings in schools with many high-need students.