Anonymous wrote:These rankings are silly - there was a NYer piece on college rankings a few years ago and it made a very compelling case that depending on how you devise the formula you can come up with just about any outcome you want. I'm probably not explaining that well but it really undermined the credibility of these kinds of lists for me.
But fwiw I don't think that WJ is quite in the same league as the other area HS. It may well be by the time the kids who are moving into $1m+ houses nowadays outside the Beltway get to HS, but if you look at the annual college admission stats they generally seem a step or so behind BCC, which itself isn't quite as competitive as the Ws.
I agree with both of your points. I think there are great students at all 3 of the Bethesda high schools, and of course the other Ws, but Whitman and Churchill especially just have more of them. I suspect the education for the top 100-200 kids per grade in each school is pretty similar, setting aside the IB option at BCC.