One of the benefits of talking to the press is that reporters often ask thought-provoking questions. Recently Noam Cohen, a New York Times columnist, called and asked me why the Net community gets so excited when a public figure professes ignorance about the Net. It’s natural for people to chuckle at Ted “Tubes” Stevens or George “Internets” Bush; but why devote so much e-ink to them? This was the topic of Mr. Cohen’s latest column, which quotes part of our conversation.

The latest victim of Net outrage was a British high court judge, Peter Openshaw, who reportedly said during a trial, “The trouble is, I don’t understand the language. I don’t really understand what a web site is.” Predictably, the Net responded with derision.

Like most folk tales, the Technologically Ignorant Policymaker story has legs because it connects to a deeply felt concern of the community. In this case, it’s the worry of Net folk that policymakers will cluelessly cripple the Net. One ill-considered comment is not by itself a big deal, but it becomes a symbol of a broader problem.

It’s worth noting, too, that in the case of Stevens and Bush the storyline resonates with the speaker’s reputations – fairly or not, neither Stevens nor Bush is thought to be particularly curious or well-informed as policymakers go. Fewer people know about Judge Openshaw, but his comment must have resonated with concerns about judges in general.

Though cathartic for Net folk, these incidents do have a down side. The next time a judge or policymaker hears technical jargon he doesn’t understand, he’ll be a bit less likely to ask for a clarification. And it’s better to ask a question and learn the answer than to stay in the dark.

Newsweek has once again issued its list of America’s Best High Schools. They’re using the same goofy formula as before: the number of students from a school who show up for AP or IB exams, divided by the number who graduate. Just showing up for an exam raises your school’s rating; graduating lowers your school’s rating.

As before, my hypothetical Monkey High is still the best high school in the universe. Monkey High has a strict admissions policy, allowing only monkeys to enroll. The monkeys are required to attend AP and IB exams; but they learn nothing and thus fail to graduate. Monkey High has an infinite rating on Newsweek’s scale.

Also as before, Newsweek excludes selective schools whose students have high SAT scores. Several such schools appear on a special list, with the mind-bending caption “Newsweek excluded these high performers from the list of America’s Best High Schools because so many of their students score well above the average on the SAT and ACT.” Some of these schools were relegated to the same list last year – and still, they’re not even trying to lower their SAT scores!

Newsweek’s FAQ tries to defend the formula, but actually only argues that it’s good for more students to take challenging courses. True, but that’s not what Newsweek measures. They also quote some studies, which don’t support their formula [emphasis added]:

Studies by U.S. Department of Education senior researcher Clifford Adelman in 1999 and 2005 showed that the best predictors of college graduation were not good high-school grades or test scores, but whether or not a student had an intense academic experience in high school. Such experiences were produced by taking higher-level math and English courses and struggling with the demands of college-level courses like AP or IB. Two recent studies looked at more than 150,000 students in California and Texas and found if they had passing scores on AP exams they were more likely to do well academically in college.

Worst of all, if parents pay attention to the Newsweek rankings, schools will have an incentive to maximize their scores, which they can do in three ways: (1) force more students to show up for AP/IB exams, whether or not they are academically prepared, (2) avoid having high SAT scores, (3) lower the school’s graduation rate, or at least don’t try too hard to raise it.

When asked why they publishing rankings at all, the FAQ’s answer includes this:

I am mildly ashamed of my reason for ranking, but I do it anyway. I want people to pay attention to this issue, because I think it is vitally important for the improvement of American high schools. Like most journalists, I learned long ago that we are tribal primates with a deep commitment to pecking orders.

As Monkey High principal, I agree wholeheartedly.