On Monday, Santa Fe High School was on Newsweek magazine's list of America's 1,500 best public high schools. By Tuesday, it wasn't.

A mix-up by the national publication resulted in this city's largest high school getting credit for data gathered from another Santa Fe High School, that one in Alachua, Fla., near Gainesville.

Schools with identical names proved to be a problem for the computer program that Newsweek used to sort masses of information.

State Secretary of Education Veronica García, who on Monday had issued a news release congratulating three New Mexico schools for making the list, issued a revised statement Tuesday noting the magazine's error regarding Santa Fe and extending her congratulations to Moreno Valley High School and Hobbs High School.

The rankings are based on a relatively simple formula: the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests administered to students at a particular school is divided by the number of graduating seniors.

The list includes schools with a minimum rating of 1.00, or one test for every graduating senior. The higher the ratio, the higher the ranking.

The rankings are the brainchild of long-time Washington Post education reporter and columnist Jay Mathews. Mathews said in a telephone interview Tuesday that he came up with the idea after seeing the effect of Advanced Placement courses in Los Angeles' Garfield High School.

Mathews saw how struggling students responded positively to being pushed into Advanced Placement by teacher Jaime Escalante, who was profiled in Mathews' book Escalante: The Best Teacher in America and in the movie Stand and Deliver.

Escalante's philosophy of using courses usually reserved for the highest-performing students, Mathews said, was "so at odds with the way AP was handled throughout the country."

"The truth is that average students get more out of AP," Mathews said.

Before his rankings, schools were judged primarily on test scores, he said, which traditionally correlate more to family income than to the quality of schools. "It occurred to me that rating schools by AP participation took us from this very dysfunctional way of rating schools," Mathews said.

The rankings have been criticized for being too simplistic or for encouraging schools to push into Advanced Placement students who are not prepared for rigorous curriculum.

But many agree that Advanced Placement courses are a good way to prepare students for college, even if they struggle with coursework and don't pass exams.

"Even if a child doesn't get a passing score on the exam, there's just no substitute for the rigor," said Bill Herschleb, principal of the Santa Fe High School that did make the list.

Herschleb has been a believer in the Advanced Placement curriculum for years and knows plenty of students who had to work extremely hard to cope with the level of work in AP courses, but who eventually appreciated it. "Many of them come back and say 'I sure am glad I took that class,' " he said.

In New Mexico, Santa Fe High students took 211 Advanced Placement exams during the 2007-08 school year. With a graduating class of 303, that meant the school's index was .696, well below the cut-off point for making the Newsweek list.

Capital High School, which is often perceived as being the lower-performing of the two public high schools, had a higher index: .843. Students there took 172 Advanced Placement exams and 204 seniors graduated.

Just a few years ago, Capital had trouble recruiting enough students to offer Advanced Placement courses. Thanks primarily to a program that focuses on first-generation college goers — Advancement Via Individual Determination, or AVID — that has changed.

"There will be over 200 AVID students next year, and all are encouraged to take at least one AP class," said Kristen Krell with the ENLACE/Gear Up Collaborative, which funds AVID.

Like Mathews, Krell agrees that access to rigorous courses, with the support needed to be successful, better prepares students for college. Not doing so, she said, is "setting students up for failure."

Contact John Sena at 986-3079 or jsena@sfnewmexican.com.