Montgomery Schools Call U.S. News' High School Ranking Inaccurate

BETHESDA, MD — A national high school ranking list published last week by U.S. News & World Report is drawing the ire of Montgomery County Public Schools officials. In this year's list, the magazine — which is considered the gold standard for education ranking — only ranked one Montgomery County high school among the best in the nation.

A handful of local schools also made the national list. However, Walt Whitman in Bethesda was the only high school in the district to make the top 100 this year. It also was ranked the best high school in the state of Maryland.

Days after the list was published, Montgomery County Public Schools sent a letter to residents, calling the rankings potentially inaccurate.

"(A)ll of our schools were identified in the top 40 percent of high schools in the nation. We congratulate all of our schools for their achievements," the district said. "However, we want to bring to your attention a potential discrepancy in data for some schools.

"We have identified that several schools in our district did not have the full complement of their data as part of the magazine's review. We believe this may have led to an assessment of their performance that is inaccurate. We have reached out to U.S. News and World Report and are working with the Maryland State Department of Education to better understand the situation."

Bethesda Beat reported that Derek Turner, a school district spokesman, said Winston Churchill, Walter Johnson, Poolesville, and John F. Kennedy high schools were missing either reading or mathematics proficiency data.

"Based on an analysis, using that proficiency data would have increased the schools' scoring and altered rankings," Turner said.

U.S. News & World Report is widely considered the global authority on education rankings.

The factors considered in compiling the list include college readiness; reading and math proficiency; reading and math performance; underserved student performance; college curriculum breadth; and graduation rates. College readiness measures participation and performance on advanced placement and international baccalaureate exams.

The data also take into account school enrollment, student diversity, participation in free and reduced-price meal programs, graduation rates and the results of state assessment tests. U.S. News worked with the global research firm RTI International to rank the schools.

Robert Morse, chief data strategist for U.S. News & World Report, responded to officials calling the list inaccurate. In a statement Friday to Montgomery Community Media, Morse said that Maryland "suppresses" some of its school data, forcing the magazine to rely on available state assessment data.

"In order to calculate the rankings for more than 17,000 high schools, U.S. News relies on state assessment data that comes directly from the states," Morse wrote. "For privacy reasons, some states, withhold — or suppress — some data involving small numbers of participants. This includes Maryland. In those cases, U.S. News factored in state assessment data only on subject exams for which enough data was available, which is consistent with our methodology."