Whitman ranked among the top schools in the area and in the nation on the Washington Post High School Challenge Index ratings, released May 22.

Whitman came in 17th locally and 122nd nationwide, placing behind several other Montgomery County schools, including B-CC, which was second in the area, Richard Montgomery, Poolesville, Walter Johnson, Churchill and Wootton High Schools.

Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews developed the ratings system, which is designed to indicate levels of academic challenge at high schools nationwide, in 1998. It calculates the number of AP, IB and Advanced International Certificate of Education tests taken at each school and divides that number by the number of graduating seniors.

Mathews believes his system reflects the overall quality of a school, he said.

“It’s better than the usual way we rank schools, which is by average test scores, because that is really a measure not of how well the school is doing, but of the income of the parents,” Mathews said. “If you get a school with very high average test scores, that school, like Whitman, is going to have very few low-income students and a lot of affluent students. My way of measuring schools gets away from family background and into how hard is the staff at that school working to involve as many students as possible in college-level courses.”

Principal Alan Goodwin, however, doesn’t believe the ratings are a broad enough measure of overall school quality.

“There are a lot of schools above us [on the list], but we still have higher SATs that a lot of those schools,” he said. “There are so many ways of measuring a school, some better than others.”

This was the first year that Mathews compiled a national list, but Whitman’s place in the region has declined in recent years. It was 13th locally last year and placed highest in 2007, at 7th place. Its challenge index, the numerical rating derived from Mathews’ formula, has also decreased slightly since it peaked in 2010.

However, Goodwin said he isn’t concerned about Whitman’s ranking in the challenge index.

“That particular index is based just on quantity and if our number was higher it’d mean more kids would be taking APs, and they’d be overstressed or be taking a course that would be too hard for them,” Goodwin said.

Goodwin expects the number to increase somewhat in future years as the school slowly expands dual-enrollment college courses offered to seniors. Final exams in these classes, which are given in conjunction with Montgomery College, also count for the Challenge Index.

Even with the increasing number of college courses offered at Whitman, Goodwin said he wanted to ensure that students only enroll if they feel prepared.

“Our teachers want to be careful not to water down the AP material by having too many people take the class,” he said.