Does the New Ranking Really Mean Something for Walls Students?
School Without Walls is now 5th in the nation according to US News. So, what? The ranking is somewhat of a hot topic for discussion among administration, students, and parents. A common question is: what did we do to justify such a massive jump?
I’m Ronan Shah, a junior at Walls. I’m a layout editor for the Rookery and on the debate team, so I often have strong opinions that I look at from an analytical perspective. I’ve been hearing about the new ranking from just about everyone at Walls, so I decided that I would check it out.
Before tackling whether it’s actually substantial or not, do we even deserve this honor? It’s a little complicated. Now, School Without Walls is a great school, and our student body reflects that. However, when it comes to our sudden and drastic rank increase, it’s not because we did something amazing all of a sudden, it’s because we stayed consistent in a time period of decline. As far as I’ve been able to identify, the data US News used for the rankings this year is the 2023-2024 data set, which was a period of recovery after the COVID-19 Pandemic for most schools, especially in D.C.. However, Walls stayed consistently high scoring on state exams, leading to a large gap between Walls and other D.C. schools. So, in other words, Walls didn’t change, but everyone else did.
Additionally, the use of old data sets means that the current population of Walls isn’t necessarily reflected in our ranking. I have faith that we will continue to score extremely high on exams, but the only people in our school who had a part in the test scores used are the current seniors.
One way or another, we’re 5th in the nation now, so what does that mean for our school? In the short term, not too much. It helps as an easy indicator of Walls’s rigor to colleges. And that’s about it. It likely won’t substantially change our student body, our funding, or school community.
Our student body performs at a high level, which is a major part of the reason we received this rank, but our current rank isn’t going to change that. Our student body will continue to be the vibrant and intelligent community that we are, just with some extra bragging rights now.
To my, and Google’s, knowledge, DCPS funding for Walls doesn’t plan to increase because of the new ranking, so in terms of facilities and budgets, we’re pretty much the same school. Students just have an extra way of justifying our complaining now that we’re the “5th school nation-wide.”
One potentially important effect is the halo effect which may follow our new ranking. Already, colleges will be paying more attention to applicants from Walls – a benefit of being one of the best public high schools in the country, but this could have an impact on incoming faculty, prospective internships, and more. However, this is likely going to be more of a longer term result, meaning it can only take effect if we maintain our current rank.
On the topic of sustaining our current ranking, it depends on the rest of D.C. The only thing we can do as Walls students is keep scoring high and putting effort in. However, since the spike we see was primarily due to the recovery period of COVID-19, we may return to our previous rank, or at the very least decrease in rank. This, of course, is uncertain, but in my opinion, Walls has what it takes to keep ourselves higher than where we were last year.
In short, Walls’ new ranking is relatively unsubstantial at the moment, but can definitely have an effect in the future.
