One of the reasons the recent tax increases in Maryland were needed was the huge increase in educational spending by the state over the past several years. Now, as I have pointed out before, I am no particular fan of the educational establishment. Their constant insistence on more and more money while resisting accountability or performance measurement has weakened their case in my view.
But the case for education in general is a strong one. As I've pointed out before, Maryland's number one rank in median household income is closely related to the relatively high educational attainment of Maryland residents. In an increasingly globalized economy, the only way to maintain our high living standard will be to have a highly educated and productive workforce.
With that in mind, I'd like to take a moment to recognize the relatively high ranking of a number of Maryland schools in the recent US News ranking of the nation's high schools. Of course, I understand that all such rankings need to be taken with a grain of salt, it's difficult to boil down the many factors that go into high school achievement into a single ranking, but the recognition is valuable, nonetheless.
Their ranking looked at 18,790 high schools in 40 states that provided data. The ranking looked at reading and math test scores for all students on each state's high school test and then factored in the percentage of economically disadvantage students in each school to identify those that were performing better than would be expected. The then looked at the least-advantaged students in each school and selected those schools where the least-advantaged students were performing better than average. Finally, they looked at AP participation rates along with how well students did on AP tests. Only schools with a sufficient number of AP students were ranked by this criteria.
Three schools in Maryland, all in Montgomery County, ranked in the top 100 using these criteria and received gold medals. An additional ten schools, in Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Howard County and Washington County received silver medals - ranking in the top 3% of all high schools in the country.
Finally, thirteen Maryland high schools received bronze medals. Many of these were smaller schools in rural areas and didn't have enough AP students to be ranked in AP attainment and were thus ineligible to be judged in the top two categories. These schoos were in Baltimore City, Garrett County, Somerset County, Washington County and Worcester County. Only 1,086 of the 18,790 schools that were studied received bronze medals
One of the goals of the increased state education funding was to provide additional funding to lower-income counties where school spending had lagged due to lack of resources and thus give students in these schools more opportunity to succeed. I think this report shows that the program is working.
Special congratulations to the Board of Education, the educators and the students of Somerset County here on The Eastern Shore. Despite the lowest per capita income in the state, both of the Somerset County high schools received bronze medals. Also congratulations to Washington County which did very well. Here in Worcester County, I was pleased to see Snow HIll High School made the list.
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