Montgomery County High School Graduation Rate Eighth In State; Wootton Leads Rockville Schools

Photo of Thomas S. Wootton High School from Montgomery County Public Schools

Yesterday, the state released its annual “report card,” a large amount of information about how each school and district is doing in the state. This is part of the No Child Left Behind law that mandated testing in all districts to better see where things are working and where there are problems.

Standardized testing is not the only way to gauge academic progress, nor is it necessarily the best way. However, it can provide a good bottom-line snapshot. At a minimum, most everyone would agree we share a goal of having all high school students graduate.

Montgomery County Schools issued a release pointing out that our graduation rate rose at 24 of the 25 high schools in the school district, and praising our overall 90 percent graduation rate.

The Maryland Report Card site appears to be purposefully designed to discourage comparisons, but the data are there for those who are interested in delving more deeply. It’s a tedious job. (Here it is by MoCo school.)

One group that is interested and crunches the numbers is the Parents Coalition of Montgomery County. They put together a quick table of graduation rates in Maryland by county and found that Montgomery County is eighth out of 24 counties. The all-state average is 86.6%, and the county with the highest graduation rate is Carroll County, at 95.3%.

The graduation rate would appear to put Montgomery County at the top of the second tier of school districts statewide.

As we like to focus in on Rockville around here, I went ahead and looked at the rates by school.

• Thomas S. Wootton High School: 97.8% (3rd in county)
• Richard Montgomery High School: 90.8% (14th in county)
• Rockville High School: 89.6% (15th in county)

Congratulations Thomas S. Wootton!

Interestingly, Wootton is the most crowded high school in Rockville, at 118% of capacity. (RM is at 104.7%, and Rockville is under capacity at 78.6%).

Here are all the MCPS schools, in descending graduation order:

Rank	School	Grad Rate
	All MCPS	90
	ALL STATE	86.6
	Carroll Cty (highest county)	95.3
1	Poolesville	99.3
2	Winston Churchill	98.2
3	Thomas S. Wootton	97.8
4	Walt Whitman	96.9
5	Bethesda-Chevy Chase	95.9
6	Damascus	95.8
7	Walter Johnson	95.7
8	Sherwood	95.2
9	Clarksburg	93.1
10	Northwest	92.5
11	Col. Zadok Magruder	91.5
12	Quince Orchard	91.5
13	Paint Branch	91.2
14	Richard Montgomery	90.8
15	Rockville	89.6
16	James Hubert Blake	89.2
17	Seneca Valley	89.0
18	Montgomery Blair	88.1
19	Springbrook	88.1
20	John F. Kennedy	87.6
21	Gaithersburg	86.8
22	Albert Einstein	85.6
23	Wheaton	84.5
24	Watkins Mill	83.9
25	Northwood	82.9

This is from a pdf available from MCPS, but I did the reordering.

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