Who's Got The Best School & District Data?
I rarely look at individual school- or district-level achievement data, and when I do I never know where to go. State and district report cards are often hard to find -- and not exactly user-friendly when you get there. The two sites I know about have strengths and weaknesses. There's the GreatSchools.net, which was funded in part by New School Venture Fund and is focused on parents, then there's SchoolMatters.com, created by Standard and Poor's with help from Gates and Broad. Then there's Just4Kids.
Which is better? Well, GreatSchools has the 2006 data for Chicago, while SchoolMatters has easy to find AYP information (for 2005). Just4Kids has 2005 information only, and an "opportunity gap" ratings system.
Someone told me GreatSchools gets 30 million pageviews a month. Wow.
Comments
I personally prefer to do my research at the state department of education websites, since I can get raw data. Schoolmatters has a great feature that allows you to download the data directly into excel, but the website is slightly slower than greatschools.
What you really need to compare is the ease with which you can access data from the state websites. Some states the data is easy to find, others it requires several minutes of clicking around to locate.
Posted by: Rory Hester | May 2, 2007 9:03 PM