How do we rate schools? Part II: GreatSchools.org

This post is part of a series on online school rating systems. To read the first post click here. 

School Choice is a hot button issue these days. And while I am very skeptical of several recent school choice initiatives, one might think that school choice is a new idea.  But the fact is that school choice is not really a new concept. The difference was that the point at which school choice occurred was not at the application process.

School choice has been built into home buying.

How many times have you heard “We want to live somewhere with a good school district.” For a long time, moving into a school district or school zone has been the preferred method of school choice for those who can afford it.

That is why, when you look up a property on Redfin and Zillow, the local school is posted right there. And right next to each school, you’ll see a rating from 1 to 10. Nearby, you’ll see this little note:

So how does Great Schools come up with their scores?

GreatSchools is a non-profit organization who seek to “help parents find the right school for their family and improve schools in their communities.”  This separates it from Niche, which is for-profit and has no mission to improve schools.

Another thing that separates it from Niche is that it offers this disclaimer next to a lot of its scores:

This is a very fair disclaimer, because to put it mildly, the scores that it gives are not very fair or informative.

In most states, including California, the Great Schools rating is based on one indicator – test scores. And the way that they rate schools is very simple. They line up all the schools in the state, look at their proficiency scores, and create deciles of performance. If you are in the 90th to 100th percentile, you get a 10. If you are in the 40th to 50th percentile, you get a 5.

The advantage of this is that is simple and easy and clean. The disadvantage is that it does not really measure if a school is good or not. It only uses overall proficiency, instead of growth. So a school might get a great score simply because the kids came in high performing. In addition, it doesn’t measure things like suspension rates or English Language reclassification.

There are a couple of things that GreatSchools does that are a step in the right direction. They show how different ethnicities and socioeconomic levels perform compared to statewide averages at a given school.

But none of those attributes are included in the school rating. 

So that disclaimer that GreatSchools offers – the one about it only being a starting point – is extremely important. Unfortunately, the disclaimer does not appear on Redfin, and is not prominently featured on Zillow (you have to hover over an information icon).

Instead or being a cautious entry point, I have actually had conversations with parents who think that those school ratings are the official state ratings. After all, the ratings are presented with a certain amount of factual certainty on the real estate websites along side information on property transfers and taxes.

GreatSchools argues that what is needed to make a strong rating system is a greater data transparency: “Of particular interest is information on student outcomes, such as student test scores, high school graduation rates, course completion rates, etc.”

But a lot of this information is out there, and GreatSchools is just not using it. I have posted about AP scores, UC Acceptance rates, suspension rates and all sorts of “student outcomes” that are public data and that GreatSchools doesn’t bother to attempt to include.

There are a lot better ways to look at schools and rate them than Niche or GreatSchools, but unfortunately, it seems like they are the ones that get the most attention.

I think that the reason they are so popular is that they are clean and easy to digest. That is probably why the API score of yesteryear was so popular. It was clean and easy to digest. But was it fair? More on that next time.