What the Consensus on Rankings?

[Anonymous]

I know US News & World Report has their rankings and Washington Post has another and we're taking both of those into consideration when deciding where to buy in MoCo. But is there a general consensus from the MoCo community on how area high schools rank?
Here are the schools where our DC would feed into when the time comes (in no particular order). How would you rank them?

Walter Johnson, Wooton, BCC, Churchill, Whitman

[Anonymous]

And apologies for the type in the header (hit submit too fast)

[Anonymous]

Hahaha! Not my day. TYPO in the header.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I know US News & World Report has their rankings and Washington Post has another and we're taking both of those into consideration when deciding where to buy in MoCo. But is there a general consensus from the MoCo community on how area high schools rank?
Here are the schools where our DC would feed into when the time comes (in no particular order). How would you rank them?

Walter Johnson, Wooton, BCC, Churchill, Whitman

The consensus is there is no consensus... Depends on many factors which is preferable to whom. Ranking them really serves no purpose in my opinion.

[Anonymous]

Which ones have the smaller class sizes? Or are they all equal?

[Anonymous]

For me, when we were choosing where to live - we chose based on the HS cluster - we could have gone to any of the clusters you listed - we chose WJ because we felt, rightly or wrongly, that it wasn't so Richy Rich as Whitman and Churchhill, nor so insanely driven as Wooten, but still offered a great public school. So it was the best for us. B-CC didn't factor into the equation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For me, when we were choosing where to live - we chose based on the HS cluster - we could have gone to any of the clusters you listed - we chose WJ because we felt, rightly or wrongly, that it wasn't so Richy Rich as Whitman and Churchhill, nor so insanely driven as Wooten, but still offered a great public school. So it was the best for us. B-CC didn't factor into the equation.

Why didn't BCC factor in for you?

[Anonymous]

We wanted to live in the BCC zone but either the real estate was out of our budget, or the house was not metro accessible - walking distance - a must for us.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I know US News & World Report has their rankings and Washington Post has another and we're taking both of those into consideration when deciding where to buy in MoCo. But is there a general consensus from the MoCo community on how area high schools rank?
Here are the schools where our DC would feed into when the time comes (in no particular order). How would you rank them?

Walter Johnson, Wooton, BCC, Churchill, Whitman

Seriously?

There is a sucker born every minute.

[Anonymous]

Just rank them in order by the percentage of white students from highest to lowest and that will basically be the consensus.

People who think their kids are getting a more "diverse" experience because their kids are at WJ or BCC instead of Whitman or Churchill are completely out of touch.

[Anonymous]

We didn't worry too much about schools because we were looking in the Bethesda-Chevy Chase area and figured any of those pyramids would be fine. Very few if any people have had kids at more than one school so most of this is just perception and gossip but my perception is that BCC is a little bit less of a pressure cooker than Whitman. BCC also is the only one of those schools with an IB program, if that interests you.

[Anonymous]

Those schools are all similar enough as far as colleges. The new Bethesda Magazine shows acceptance rates at all those schools.

Here's an example of accepted out of number who applied. Harvard: BCC-2/27, Wooton-0/18, Walter Johnson-2/16, RM-2/39, Whitman-1/26, Churchill-0/27. They all vary for each college in the listing and in the end it's a wash.

[Anonymous]

The 0-27 cannot be right for Churchill. Are you sure it wasn't 20/27?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Just rank them in order by the percentage of white students from highest to lowest and that will basically be the consensus.

People who think their kids are getting a more "diverse" experience because their kids are at WJ or BCC instead of Whitman or Churchill are completely out of touch.

Thank you for a voice of reason. Good for you OP for correctly assessing which of the 25 schools in the county are the whitest!

[Anonymous]

In terms of test scores, graduation rates and college preparedness Whitman is the clear leader but it often get penalized because save for a couple of domestic help type's kids there are simply no poor areas that feed into it and is all but void of FARMs. Now that doesn't make for a great school necessarily because those kids would probably do well anywhere but Whitman does a great job cultivating them.