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The Best High School in Montgomery County, Maryland

September 10th, 2009 Categories: Schools

What are the best Montgomery County schools? We get this question all of the time.  Of course, the answer’s easy.  The best schools are …. OK, there is no simple answer to this question.  The quality of a child’s education depends on so many complex factors that one can’t simply boil it down to a one-dimensional list of the best and the worse.  I’ll summarize key statistics for all high schools later in this article, but you won’t find a “Best Schools” list here.

But to be frank: most parents in Montgomery County and the Metro D.C. area have high expectations for their child’s education; and we talk a lot about schools.  Parents can develop very strong opinions about the “best” and the “worse”.  If you’re new to the area, you’ll get a lot of advice.  When making a decision on where to buy a home, how do you find the best school for you?

Finding “Your” best school can be a challenge

Relying exclusively on test scores and a school’s reputation may not be your best recipe for success.  We have two children in the school system and we’ve discovered that the quality of a school’s principal is a very important factor in a school’s effectiveness.  Where can you find ratings on a school’s principal?  There aren’t any.  That’s why we believe that visiting a school and meeting the principal is worthwhile.  What about parental involvement in a school?  The more that parents are engaged in the school the better, we believe.

A good place to start is to become familiar with the school clusters in your areas of interest.  Talk to neighbors and co-workers, then dig a little deeper.  The good news for any home buyer here:  regardless of where you go in Montgomery County, you’ll be part of one of the largest and highest-performing school systems in the country.  If your child has special needs, challenges or gifts, you’ll discover resources and programs unimaginable in other areas.  Magnet and special academies make many of our schools look more like colleges than high schools.

High School Enrollment

The median-sized high school has around 1,800 students.  Poolesville H.S. is the smallest with nearly 1,200 students and Montgomery Blair H.S. is the biggest with over 2,800.  Schools noted with DC or NE are part of the Downcounty Consortium and Northeast Consortium respectively.

How Schools Are Measured

Students in Montgomery County take a ton of assessment tests.  MCPS reports everything, so you can review all of the results and make your own assessment of a schools’ effectiveness.  You can see all of the results for each school in each cluster starting from the schools section of this site.  Here’s a summary of key metrics reported by MCPS:

All Schools:

• Attendance
• Enrollment
• Ethnicity
• ESOL (English for speakers of other languages)
• FARMS (free and reduced meals)
• Student/Teacher ratio
• Mobility Rate (a measure of students coming into and out of the school)

Elementary Schools:

• Terra Nova – standardized achievement test in all subjects
• MSA (Maryland State Assessment) Grade 5 Reading
• MSA Grade 5 Math

Middle Schools

• MSA Grade 8 Reading
• MSA Grade 8 Math

High Schools

• Dropout Rate
• Proficiency Reading and Math
• Honors participation
• Graduation Rate
• SAT Participation and SAT Scores
• Meets MD University requirements

High School Testing Comparison

To see how each of the high schools stack-up against each other, here’s a summary of key test results from MCPS’ 2009-10 ‘Schools at a Glance’ report sorted by SAT score:

Explore Montgomery County High Schools

Chose a high school below and see all of its metrics, test results and programs.

What’s your opinion on what makes a great school in Montgomery County? Make a comment.  I would love to know what you think.

Posted by Bruce Lemieux

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 7:13 am and is filed under Schools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1. Deirdre George said at May 19th, 2011 at 6:36 am

   In my opinion, great schools have state of the art facilities & resources, a curriculum that teaches the whole child (english, math, science, art, music, literature, P.E.), a strong parent association, and a no-tolerance level for drugs, alcohol. I think that in our changing times a return to some “old school” ways would benefit future generations. I would like to see more co-ed public schools try single sex classrooms. I would also like to see public schools enforce parent participation and family accountability as private schools do. In private schools, parent participation is mandatory and students do better when the whole family is on the same page as schools. I think single sex classrooms will yield better focus and concentration and perhaps less distractions and fewer incidents of behavioral misconduct.

2. Bruce Lemieux said at May 19th, 2011 at 7:52 am

   Deirdre – thanks for your great comment. It will be interesting to see if the new school super will maintain the current strategies set by Dr Weast, or if he will adopt new strategies like some of these.

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