There is a deeply rooted impulse in American society — perhaps any society — to rank everything from restaurants and refrigerators to athletes and colleges. That may help explain why pressures continue in California to rank its schools based on a single score of some kind, despite a major thrust in the state to move in the opposite direction. Great Schools, the hugely popular parent-oriented website, has combined several indicators to come up with score between 1 and 10 for every school in the state. Another notable push is coming from Los Angeles, where the state’s largest school district has been working over the past year on a plan to rank schools on a numerical 1-to-5 scale, a number that would be reached by combining students’ improvement on test scores and other factors. But that plan is far from being implemented.  This week newly elected school board member Jackie Goldberg introduced a harshly critical resolution effectively calling on the district to abandon the idea in its current form. Among other assertions, she argued, “the value of a public school cannot be quantified in a single, summative rating, which can shame, penalize, or stigmatize schools, education professionals, students and entire communities.” L.A. Unified’s efforts have echoes of California’s old Academic Performance Index, a single number usually ranging from 600 to over 800, assigned to every school and district based almost entirely on student scores on state and federally mandated tests. Using those numbers, schools were ranked on 1-to-10 scale, and to take into account the impact of the economic, racial and ethnic backgrounds of students, schools were ranked on a numerical scale comparing them to schools with similar student populations.