Last year, Bethesda-Chevy Chase (B-CC) and Winston Churchill were ranked by U.S. News as the two of the best high schools in the state. Winston Churchill was no. 1 and B-CC ranked as the sixth best in the state.
In the 2014 rankings, released last week, neither school was ranked, and Walter Johnson High School (WJ) wasn’t ranked for the second year in a row. How did that happen?
They didn’t pass step 1, according to Robert Morse, the director of data research for U.S. News. Step 1, says Morse, identifies schools that perform better on state tests in math and reading than would be expected based on the proportion of low-income students in the high school.
Basically, U.S. News considers a school with a higher proportion of students who are eligible for free and reduced price lunch that is proficient on state tests a “better” school than one with a low proportion of the economic indicator that does extremely well on state tests.
“If it was just on college readiness then you’re not taking into account how well schools’ are doing on their state tests after factoring in economic disadvantages and underrepresented minorities,” Morse said. He added that B-CC and Winston Churchill are “still very high performing schools in terms of college readiness.”
In fact, according to the statistics published in the U.S. News report, B-CC and Winston Churchill both had nearly identical performance stats to Walt Whitman, which was ranked as the “best” high school in the state in 2014. Walter Johnson High School was also close to Whitman in terms of performance on college-level exams and state test scores. Morse said Walter Johnson also failed to make it past step 1.
Sid Groeneman, the head of Groeneman Research & Consulting, a Bethesda company that specializes in opinion, policy and marketing surveys, said the U.S. News ranking is misleading. He said there’s two major problems with the ranking system. The first is that if a school fails the first step, then it’s out of the running to be ranked, even if it’s great at educating its students. “If you miss by a point or two, you’re out completely, so it creates these odd year-to-year fluctuations that cause people to scratch their heads,” Groeneman said.
The second, he said, is that the rankings attempt to incorporate three different measurements that shouldn’t be combined. Those are the steps U.S. News uses to rank schools—the first one is based on student achievement combined with free and reduced price lunch proportions, the second looks at if economically disadvantaged students at schools that passed step 1 had state test scores at least equal to the state’s proficiency levels, and the last one looks at the amount of participation and performance on college-level exams like Advanced Placement tests. “It’s misleading, I think, to talk about the best high schools and try to incorporate all of those three components,” Groeneman said. It would be better, says Groeneman, to either weight the three components in the overall scoring rather than specify thresholds which must be exceeded, or simply report the three component values separately.
The Washington Post also has a high schools ranking, but it only ranks schools based on their participation in college-level exams. In the 2014 ranking, Winston Churchill was third in the state, Bethesda Chevy-Chase was fourth, and Walter Johnson was seventh.
However, Morse says the U.S. News rankings aren’t meant to highlight schools with the largest percentage of college ready students, but to recognize those that achieve results with disadvantaged students.
“There’s many schools on that list that are not high performers,” Morse said. “But they’ll say ‘we’re doing a good job in our neighborhood given our circumstances.’ ”
