From MSNBC.com: "She's the Girl They Love to Hate."

I'd post the damn article here, but it's just too long. It's the story of Blair Hornstine, a Harvard-bound member of this past year's graduating class Moorestown, an upper-middle class suburb of New Jersey. You may have heard of her already; she's the girl who successfully sued her school district's Board of Education after they tried to make her share her valedictorian spot with another student. The legal action made her "social pariah" at her high school, where she was already unpopular with students due to the facts that she spent half of her day being privately tutored at home because of an autoimmune disorder and the other students saw her as "goody-goody." She won't even be attending her graduation (or didn't attend her graduation) ceremony because of rumors that students were planning booing or otherwise disrupting her valedictory speech.

Alright, my stance on this is that yes, she does deserve it, but I think that it is true that she has an unfair advantage over the other students. I only say this because the situation is somewhat similar at the high school I graduated from last spring. I went a math and science academy run by the public school system in my city that students had to apply to and be tested for in order to attend. The academy was housed inside the buildling of a regular high school, so I attended class with both advanced students and regular students. Out of the 500 in my graduating class, there were perhaps 40 or 50 of us "magnet" kids. The thing is, though, that our class had only one valedictorian.

Let's examine why this is wrong: the position of valedictorian is determined by GPA, and GPAs can be raised by taking advanced classes with weighted credit; that's how students end up with GPAs above 4.0, what the reporter calls an A++ average. At my school, the magnet students had the opportunity to take weighted classes as soon as their sophomore year, and they had more opportunities to take them. Some of our magnet classes, which the regular kids weren't allowed to take because they weren't in the academy, were weighted. So obviously, the magnet students had more chances to raise their GPAs; we had an unfair advantage over the regular students. But our school only chose one valedictorian.

This is wrong on so many levels. We were segregated from the regular kids on so many issues, but on the issue of valedictorian, schoolwide test scores, attendance rates, etc, we were counted as one school. Our principal boasted the highest standardized test scores in the citywide school district, which comprised of about 10 or 11 high schools. To anyone who had bothered to note that our scores were pretty good in all of the subjects except lower-level math courses like Algebra, it would have been obvious that the scores were so high only because 10% of the testing set were magnet students, students who had been conditioned to test and succeed. Our lower-level test scores were so low because no magnet students took these classes in high school; they had already taken them in middle school.