U.S. News & World Report Responds to MCPS Officials Critique of School Rankings

Robert Morse, the chief data strategist for U.S. News & World Report, sent MCM a statement Friday responding to Montgomery County Public Schools officials calling the 2019 national high school rankings list “inaccurate.”

Montgomery school officials had emailed the MCPS community Wednesday saying, “We have identified that several schools in our district did not have the full complement of their data as part of the magazine’s review. We believe this may have led to an assessment of their performance that is inaccurate.”

In response to these school officials, Morse said that Maryland is one of the states that “suppresses” some of its school data, so U.S. News could only factor in the state assessment data “on subject exams for which enough data was available.”

Read Morse’s full statement:

“In order to calculate the rankings for more than 17,000 high schools, U.S. News relies on state assessment data that comes directly from the states. For privacy reasons, some states, withhold —or suppress—some data involving small numbers of participants. This includes Maryland. In those cases, U.S. News factored in state assessment data only on subject exams for which enough data was available, which is consistent with our methodology.”

Previous Posts

MCPS Officials Call National High School Rankings List ‘Inaccurate’

Whitman Ranked in U.S. Top 100 High Schools

About Deirdre Byrne

Deirdre Byrne is a social media coordinator for Montgomery Community Media. She can be reached at dbyrne@mymcmedia.org or on twitter at @DeirdreByrneMCM.

View all posts by Deirdre Byrne