Summary:
Zip code 20017 in Northeast Washington, DC is home to two high schools serving grades 9–12: Washington Leadership Academy PCS and Luke C. Moore High School, with a combined enrollment of 661 students.
These two schools offer fundamentally different academic experiences despite sharing the same zip code. Washington Leadership Academy PCS, a public charter school with 386 students, posts a graduation rate of 91.9% — well above the DC state average of 78.7%. In contrast, Luke C. Moore High School, part of District of Columbia Public Schools, has a graduation rate of just 19.5%, a staggering 72.4 percentage point gap between the two schools. While Washington Leadership Academy graduates students at nearly 4.7 times the rate of Luke C. Moore, its DC CAPE proficiency rates are below state averages: 19.2% proficient in ELA and 12.0% in math, compared with state averages of 39.6% and 28.2%, respectively. No test proficiency data were reported for Luke C. Moore, which also lacks a recent school ranking.
Resource allocation differs meaningfully between the two schools. Washington Leadership Academy spends $33,946 per student and has a favorable 8:1 student-teacher ratio, while Luke C. Moore spends $30,336 per student with an 11.9:1 ratio. This means Washington Leadership Academy has roughly 49% more teachers per student than Luke C. Moore. Both schools are rated at the district level with 3 stars in DC's ranking system, but the enrollment-weighted graduation rate for the zip code is just 61.8%, far below the state average, due to Luke C. Moore's extremely low rate. For parents, the choice in this area comes down to a school that graduates most of its students but shows low test proficiency, versus a school where graduation remains a significant challenge.
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