As the parent of a young child, I am often witness to conversations about schools that drop me into a deep sense of agony. I often cringe at the way that my friends talk about choosing schools for their kids. When these topics come up, I try to stay silent or try to be modest in my word choice, because I recognize that there are a lot of different, valid opinions on this topic.
But there is one source of information that is always the most cringe-worthy to me: Online School Rating Websites.
There are several of these sites and they all have slightly different approaches – but what bothers me the most is that they all try to take all of their information and put it into one single rating. Of course, many people like this because it is clear and concise – but there are several problems with brevity.
Take Niche.com – which bills itself as a place to “Discover the schools and neighborhoods that are right for you.” On the front page you can click K-12 schools and look up any school and immediately see an “overall niche grade” in a letter grade from A to C (I am guessing because it would be too controversial to give schools a D or F).
But what troubles me about this is how they calculate that grade. They use four sub-measures to create an overall grade: Academic Score, District Overall Score, Teachers Rating, and Culture and Diversity. This is a nice attempt to be well rounded. In reality, however, it ends up creating a very strong bias in favor of schools that are whiter, wealthier and more privileged.
Let’s start with the way they look at Cultural a Diversity, which makes up 10% of the school’s overall score. 75% of culture score is based on the Student Racial Diversity Index. The thought is that schools that are more diverse provide a stronger educational experience for students – which I agree with.
Here’s the problem: the lack of racial diversity is not the fault of the school. Essentially, it is punishing schools in the “inner city” for being victims of white flight. So schools in de-facto segregated neighborhoods are essentially given a lower ranking just for being where they are.
On top of that, schools with poverty that is lower or higher than the national average are given lower scores as well – so schools scores are punished because their students come from poorer families.
The next problem is that 20% of the grade is based on the district score. This is a nice and bold idea – a school needs a strong and well run district for support.
However, the way Niche.com executes this evaluation is a mess. Very little of the grade has to do with how the district is run. Instead, 70% of this score is simply how the the district as a whole performs on tests, how diverse the district is as a whole, and attendance of the the district as a whole. As a result, if a school outperforms its district, its score still gets dragged down because of other schools.
Even more odd is that the charter schools that operate in Los Angeles and operate with high levels of independence, still get the score of the district within which they are located. For example, KIPP LA Prep, one of the highest performing charter schools in the district, gets an academic score of B+ because 30% of its academic score is based on LA Unified.
Finally, there is the variety of measures that Niche uses that are based on online surveys that Niche has on their site. Somewhere around 16% of the score is based on online surveys. These are not scientific sources or unbiased in anyway – and there is no description of how their algorithms deal with that sway. I believe online surveys will inevitably create a skew towards wealthier, more privileged parents who can write in English and have internet access.
Of course, the result of all of this is what you might expect. When you look at Niche.com’s rankings of the top 20 public high schools in “Los Angeles Metro”, none of the top 20 schools are actually located in Los Angeles. And of those 20 schools – they are located in neighborhoods that are less latino or black than most of Los Angeles, they are located in small districts with only a few high schools, and they have high numbers of ratings on Niche.com.
Niche.com forgoes authentic school ratings in favor of a highly biased calculation that relies on mindless excel spreadsheet data dumping and online surveys. Rating schools takes a lot more finesse than the system they have set up. Not that its competitors are much better….more on that later this week.