Richard Montgomery, Thomas S. Wootton In Top 100 High Schools
The closely-watched >Newsweek listing of America’s top high schools is out, and Rockville has two high schools that have made the list. Richard Montgomery High School is ranked 38 in the nation, while Thomas S. Wootton High School is 58.
Read the press release from from the school district here.
Here is a list of all the MCPS high schools, along with their rank on the “Challenge Index,” which is what Newsweek used in its calculations. (The index was created by the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews.)
High School and 2009 Rank:
- Richard Montgomery — 38
- Bethesda-Chevy Chase — 55
- Thomas Wootton — 58
- Winston Churchill — 94
- Walt Whitman — 104
- Walter Johnson — 109
- Rockville — 209
- Montgomery Blair — 287
- Quince Orchard — 294
- Albert Einstein — 295
- Poolesville — 305
- Springbrook — 324
- Paint Branch — 332
- James Hubert Blake — 381
- Watkins Mill — 391
- Sherwood — 393
- Col. Zadok Magruder — 479
- Northwest — 502
- Damascus — 577
- John F. Kennedy — 616
- Wheaton — 657
- Seneca Valley — 674
- Gaithersburg — 847
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Of course, it’s nice to have all of the County’s high schools in Newsweek’s top 1,500, but the methodology of the study by which the schools were selected seems overly simplistic and flawed. Matthews took the number of students who TOOK AP, IB and/or the Cambridge exam and divided that number by the total number of graduating seniors. The higher the number the higher the high school ranked in the study. While on the one hand a student has to have taken an AP, IB or Cambridge class to take the exam, on the other hand, the study does not account for any other variables except the single one I wrote above.The author of the study, when questioned by some commentators about this, he wrote that schools, in the past, had only allowed their best students to take the AP, IB and/or Cambridge exam so that their school would get a high ranking with Newsweek, and the study’s author felt this was unfair to students. While that might be true, it seems to me that there are many other variables that matter in the ranking of the top high schools in the country, which this study did not consider. One of the obvious ones was student scores on these exams. Other important variables seem to me would be class sizes, teacher qualifications, the quality of extracurricular activities, graduation rate, college acceptance rate, etc.Also, Rockville High School, for instance, because it is the second smallest high school in the County, has quite a few intellectually-challenged students who probably are never going to be able to take an AP or IB course or exam. So, Rockville High School probably is never going to move up in the rankings, because of this. I am not writing, at all that these intellectually-challenged students should not be at Rockville High School; I am writing that I think this study does not consider variables like this, and that, to me, is unfair, and additionally, makes this study flawed.