Residents of the District and their elected leaders have long agonized over the state of D.C. schools, a third rail in Washington city government off of which reform attempts gleefully bounce and into which depressing sums of money disappear. Frustration over the city’s subpar performance in public education becomes more difficult to bear, however, when the success of school districts in the city’s suburbs are brought to light. This week, the Post’s Jay Mathews harnesses the power of the Washington Post-Newsweek hydra to publicize his annual rankings of public high schools, and the occasion is, once again, a sour one for Washingtonians. (Full disclosure: my high school checks in at 59; Go Eagles).
Mathews ranks the schools according to a ratio of the number of AP and IB tests taken to the number of graduating seniors. Based on this statistic, Virginia’s top school, H-B Woodlawn in Arlington, checks in at 13th in the nation. There are, in fact, three Arlington County schools in the top 52 (with poor Wakefield, the fourth, sitting at an embarrassing 333). Maryland is right there with the Commonwealth; Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville sits at 15th nationally in the rankings. Overall, there are 12 schools from the close-in suburbs in the top 100 — seven in Virginia and five in Maryland.
The District’s first entry on the list is Woodrow Wilson, which comes in at number 180, and which is followed by Banneker at 203. For spots in a list of national rankings, this isn’t too bad, but the contrast with Arlington County, in particular, is stark. D.C. has about three times as many people as Arlington, with about the same ratio of children under 18, but the city’s schools come nowhere near the top of Mathews’ list. There are important differences between the jurisdictions, to be sure. Arlington’s median household income is about $20,000 higher than that in the District, and the percentage of residents, 25 years and older, with a bachelor’s degree is twice as high in Arlington as in the city. And of course, wealthy Washingtonians have taken the legacy of poor schools in the District into their own hands, sending their children to a handful of top-flight private schools such as St. Albans, Sidwell Friends and Gonzaga.
The matter is sure to remain grist for the mayoral mill as election season rolls on. Whether D.C. officials can learn from the success of our neighbors remains to be seen.
Photo of H-B Woodlawn is from the school’s website.
