Educational Redlining: How Zillow’s School Ratings Help Segregate Communities
Heights Community Congress has just released Educational Redlining: How Zillow and GreatSchools Profit from Suspect School Ratings and Harm Communities, a report on the practice by Zillow, the real estate website, and GreatSchools to guide home buyers to choose communities according to color-coded school ratings posted online. Heights Community Congress (HCC), founded in 1972, is Greater Cleveland, Ohio’s oldest fair housing enforcement organization. For over four decades HCC has been conducting audits of the real estate industry to expose and discourage racial steering and disparate treatment of African American and white home seekers. This blog covered HCC’s preliminary work on educational redlining here.
Ralph Day, author of HCC’s report, explains that GreatSchools, launched by the venture capital group, NewSchools Venture Fund, “arbitrarily divides schools into three categories—green, yellow, and red.” In most states GreatSchools’ ratings merely represent the aggregate standardized test scores of each school’s students. Day continues: “The act of coloring red whole communities of schools is an alarming reminder of mortgage redlining of recent past, which was declared illegal with the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many home seekers automatically exclude whole communities with ‘red’ labeled schools from their search. And Zillow in its book (Zillow Talk) exacerbates this trend by cheerfully steering home buyers into the highest rated (highest income) GreatSchools areas they can afford.”
Day summarizes GreatSchools’ methodology: “In most states, GreatSchools rates schools on their standardized test scores alone. Schools of the same grade levels are ordered within their state from high scores to low. Then a school’s rank is converted to a number 1 through 10, where 10 means the school is in the top 10 percent, 1 the lowest 10 percent, 5 and 6 about in the middle, and so on.” Day continues: “In the past, mortgage redlining was practiced to systematically withhold financing from certain communities that lenders chose for Educational Redlining: How Zillow’s School Ratings Help Segregate Communities | janresseger: