Perennially high-achieving Walt Whitman High School is the No. 1 public high school in Maryland and No. 61 best public high school in the country, according to rankings published Tuesday by U.S. News & World Report.
The website’s popular annual rankings gave seven MCPS schools a gold medal rating for being among the top 500 public high schools in the nation. Four others got a silver medal rating for being among the top 2,019 schools.
The analysis used 2011-2012 data on overall student performance on state-mandated tests, education of minority and economically disadvantaged students and school performance on Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams.
For a glaring reason not to take the rankings too seriously, just take a look at Winston Churchill High School, which somehow wasn’t ranked at all.
The Potomac school was ranked as the best public high school in Maryland in both the 2012 and 2013 U.S. News analysis. Bethesda-Chevy Chase and Walter Johnson High Schools were also unranked this year.
The top 4,707 high schools in the country qualified for the list, U.S. News said.
Wootton (No. 65), Poolesville (No. 83) and Richard Montgomery (No. 163) followed Whitman among MCPS schools.
