How do parents find the best school for their kids? The question has never been more pressing. Accountability measurements for school performance are increasingly available, and choice of schools is becoming more common, both within public school systems and between public and private schools. But the demand for good information for decision-making continues to grow, in part as families in an increasingly mobile workforce move from district to district and state to state.
To a remarkable extent, parents making the crucial decision of where to send their kids have to rely on anecdotal information about schools and their "reputation" -- often provided by real estate agents who are not always objective or knowledgeable -- rather than hard data. Many states offer assessment measurements of schools or school districts online, but the information is rarely user-friendly. Virginia, for example, provides assessments of every school and district on its Department of Education Web page, but reading them requires a detailed understanding of the state's arcane "Standards of Learning" testing system.
In California and Arizona, on the other hand, parents -- or for that matter, anyone -- can go to one Web site and find out pretty much everything that's available anywhere, from performance data to staff and facilities -- even a map to find the school. Thanks to an agreement between the states and Greatschools.net, a nonprofit organization, all this data is made available in a highly user-friendly format (including such resources as a glossary of education terms and a "tool kit" for planning a school visit), and on a comparative basis across school and district lines. Greatschools.net also encourages individual schools to post additional information of their own about more subjective features, including extracurricular activities, student life, educational philosophy, and special honors. Though the system began strictly with public schools, the more limited state data on private schools in both states is also available.
An August 30 Arizona Daily Star feature on Greatschools.net quoted a variety of testimonials to the importance of the service by principals, teachers, elected officials, and most of all, parents. One parent told the newspaper that she used to spend hours at a public library sorting through individual school reports on test scores. But after accessing Greatschools.net, she "looked at the site and found that 30 percent of the teachers [at her child's school] had less than three years' experience in the classroom. And I think last year my son had every one of them."
Her experience shows why such user-friendly and comparative school information systems are important not just to newcomers and other "school shoppers," but to every parent and taxpayer who cares about the quality of schools. Educational accountability depends on clear and comparative information about school performance, based on meaningful standards and measurable results. That's how you get Great Schools.
Both President Clinton and Vice President Gore strongly support requiring all states to provide school report cards to empower parents with performance information. With Greatschools.net, California and Arizona are doing just that.
