How important are school ratings?

[Liziz]

I wonder if there's some local Facebook pages you could join that have commentary on the local schools? We have some schools in my area that aren't rated well, but parents who have kids there love them. Then we also have some schools in the area that aren't rated well....and parents who have kids there are always furious, miserable, or some combination of the two. I'd work on finding input from parents in the area.

As others suggested, I'd also look into what's available at the schools in question. Like SnuggleBuggles said, I'd want to see that there are opportunities for a diverse amount of activities, advanced classes when appropriate, and strong teachers.

[AnnieW625]

I agree a lot with what SnuggleBuggles said. One thing I have found is that you need to click on the score for low income students and then it will give you the score for non low income students. That will raise the score from a 4 to a 7 or an 8. I believe they think this is correlated with the test scores. I am not a fan of teaching to the test, but I am more concerned about resources, and a strong PTA that may be able to provide those resources of the district budget can’t. My DD2 goes to a school that is a great schools 9 for both low income and non low income (she was transferred by the district from our home school which was a 7 due to over crowding) and while the experience education wise has been pretty good I feel like her school does a lot of teaching to the test, especially this year in the 4th grade.

Here is an example of what I was talking about above (before clicking on low income students....this is the data for one of the elementary schools in the area we are looking to move to):


After clicking on low income students:


ETA: the above school on Niche is a B, DD2’s current school is a A, and our home school is now an A- (it was a D+ or a 2 when DD1 would’ve started kindergarten plus daycare was more than Catholic school tuition). The middle school and high school in our new area are a B, and a B+. FWIW my high school in NorCal is a B- and if we lived there I would have no problem sending my kids there; it was probably the same ratings it would have had when I went there.


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[gymnbomb]

Thanks, I will do some more digging. Out of curiosity I looked up the 4 schools I attended as a kid, though I am sure they have changed a lot since then. My middle school appears to no longer exist. One elementary is a 4, one is a 10 (that one is on a military base), and high school is a 5.

Funding is definitely an issue at our current elementary school. PTA tries to raise enough money for each grade to get one field trip per year, and teachers do Donors Choose requests for classroom materials. I contributed to the two his K teacher put out and one from the music teacher. I volunteered at library time quite a few times last fall and was pretty underwhelmed. But I have almost no basis for comparison (other than memories of loving the bright, cheerful, huge library in my 10 rated elementary school in 4-6 grade).

Percentage of students who are “proficient” in math and reading is abysmal in our current district, and not good in our state as a whole, but that may be more a function of the testing than of the teachers.

Mostly I just want my kids to like school and have a good experience there. We can supplement academics at home if needed.


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[Globetrotter]

We literally chose our house because the neighboring school has the highest rankings in the area and stellar test scores. Ironically, we ended up transferring the kids to a different school later on because we didn’t like the accompanying high pressure atmosphere. Both of my kids are strong academically, so it wasn’t even that.
Now that I’m older and wiser, I would look for other things. Try to talk to parents if you can, but they must be like-minded parents. Find out if the administration is supportive of the parent teacher organization. Is there a lot of parent involvement and volunteerism? Are they able to raise funds for projects? Look into the school culture and the amount of homework and extracurriculars on site, and after school care if that is a factor.
Other factors will be particular to your own kids. Do they have any special needs? That includes gifted programs. How do they differentiate? What special programs do they offer, like art. We live in a high-pressure area, so stress reduction was a concern for me. I have relatives who have the opposite issue as their local schools don’t offer enough challenge to the kids. In our area, there are so many kids who identify as gifted that it becomes an issue. the honors program is huge. Whereas, in some other districts or schools you may find there aren’t enough kids for high level classes.

We moved the kids back into our area for high school, which is fairly high pressure due to the crowd, but they do try to address the stress issues so it’s a good balance for me. Our biggest issue is district budget cuts, and due to that we have lost important classes even. It is really disheartening, and that was pre-Covid. People have lost faith in the school board and teachers union, due to non-performing teachers allowed to stay on and stuff like that, so they’ve started voting against school bonds.

As you can see, there’s a lot more to it than school rankings :-)

[Dayzy]

I just checked our local school and saw it's a 2/10. And after reading I can see it's because of low income students and bad test scores and such. More than half the students coming into our local school have never spoken English before. We have a large immigrant population and the teachers are amazing for what they are able to accomplish. I don't trust those ratings one bit.

[Kindra178]

It depends. If you have perfectly normal, high achieving kids, easy test taking kids, any school is fine. For example, most public school systems provide extra help (pull out, push in) when a student achieves a certain score on a standardized test, ie MAP or AIMs WEB. In a wealthy district, a kid may qualify extra help with a national percentile cut off of 40-50% (some districts decide to provide extra help using local standards too, so a 50% national test score may equate to a 15% local standard). In a district where many kids may require help, a kid may not get help until below the 20th or 10th percentile.

[SnuggleBuggles]

Schools, like mine, that are Title 1 schools are eligible for a lot of great enrichment programs. We have opportunities other schools don’t (like an amazing speaker series of famous authors and important figures). I imagine a school needs to have someone that knows to seek those out but there are definitely near hidden advantages to schools that might look less than ideal on the outside.


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