What to know before using school ratings tools from real estate companies
Jack Schneider is an assistant professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross, Mass., the director of research for the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment, and the author of the soon-to-be-published “Beyond Test Scores: A Better Way to Measure School Quality.” His earlier books are “Excellence For All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America’s Public Schools” and “From the Ivory Tower to the Schoolhouse: How Scholarship Becomes Common Knowledge in Education.”
Schneider co-hosts the education policy podcast Have You Heard, and has written several posts for this blog, including one titled, “If Only Teachers Were Smarter …” He can be found on Twitter: @Edu_Historian
This post is thematically related to his new book.
By Jack Schneider
I like where I live, in New England’s most densely populated city. My wife likes it, too, as does our daughter, who attends the public school across the street. Each morning, when we walk her to school, we feel lucky to live where we do, and happy about the education she’s getting. And when we interact with other families at the school — families that represent the many colors, creeds, and conditions of America — we worry a little less that the nation is coming apart at the seams.
But we wouldn’t have moved here if we had given any consideration to the school rating tools available from real estate companies like Zillow and Trulia. We wouldn’t have even looked at what their websites deem an “average” school, earning only a 6 on a 10-point scale. Instead, we’d be scrambling to make our mortgage payment in one of the region’s leafy suburbs.
Just because we ignored the ratings doesn’t mean we ignored the basic question of school quality. Before we put our bid in, I visited the school and took a tour; I talked with the What to know before using school ratings tools from real estate companies - The Washington Post: