Thomas Jefferson tops list of best high schools

Rockville’s Wootton High School, Bethesda’s Walt Whitman and Potomac’s Winston Churchill fell out of the top 100 schools in the nation, after ranking as high as 34th in 2007-08. Fairfax’s Langley High School in McLean ranked 47th, making it the only other Virginia school to place in the top tier. No Maryland schools made the top 100.

The U.S. News rankings are in their third year. They are determined first by a school’s scores on statewide standardized tests, with special attention paid to the performance of low-income and minority students, and then by college readiness, gauged by Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate tests.

Montgomery officials expressed some surprise about the results, said spokesman Dana Tofig. He expressed wariness over U.S. News’ method that relies upon state test scores, “which have proven to be pretty unreliable measures,” he said.

Even though the three Montgomery schools bumped from the top 100 posted high state test scores last year, the U.S. News metric is kinder to schools that perform well and have racially and economically diverse student bodies.

Thomas Jefferson Principal Evan Glazer reacted to the ranking with a winner’s humility, saying that about 10 schools nationwide have results on par with his school, but that “somehow we rose to the top.”

Magnet schools like his — TJ draws from much of Northern Virginia — are especially hard to measure because they are specialized. At TJ, the focus is on science and technology. But Glazer cited any number of specialties, from performing arts to vocational skillls.

“The standard tools for student achievement are only touching on the brink of the surface,” he said. “There’s so much more depth and complexity that you’d see beneath that surface, but that isn’t evaluated by this metric.

“How do you measure the extent to which the student has achieved a level of intellectual curiosity that propels them to be inventive? You can’t put that on a national scale — that has to be measured student by student,” Glazer said.

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Best of the best

A handful of Washington-area schools made the U.S. News & World Report list of top high schools, with some surprising additions and exceptions. Silver schools were not ranked numerically. Honorable mention went to schools with excellent scores on AP and IB tests, but that did not make U.S. News’ first cut based on state test scores.