Parents sharing the process of searching for a school in Greater Philadelphia. What kind of school are you looking for? Charter, public, private, city, suburban?
The easiest thing to find when evaluating a school is the schools performance on standardized tests. The information is public and is easy to compare between schools. But how much weight should you put on those scores in your school decision?
I once had a principal tell me that other schools cheated on their test reporting. It’s not just sour grapes. Recently the Inquirer questioned a school’s test scores.
But let’s just put the possibility of cheating aside for a moment and assume that the numbers are legitimate. Test scores are not important for school evaluation because the biggest predictor of test scores is household income . That has been documented by several studies, some of which I cite at the bottom of this article. Recently I came across a great map created by University of Pennsylvania graduate student and blogger Kirsten Hill. The map illustrates the relationship with household income and test scores very effectively with a map overlaying Philadelphia census data with low performing “Renaissance” and consistently dangerous schools.
So there you have it. A school with a more economically disadvantaged population will generally have lower test scores. But should you throw out test scores altogether? Not at all. The question you should ask about schools is how much better/worse do students do on tests than schools in the same economic strata. The School District of Philadelphia actually calculates those comparative numbers for you with its School Performance Index. With the SPI, the district actually rates each school as compared to its peer institutions on a scale of 1 to 10. What is important are not the scores themselves but the improvement year to year. These numbers were actually used to designate schools as Vanguard (top) or Renaissance (bottom) for other initiatives. But the ratings are public and can be useful in the school decision making process. Take a look at the ratings of the schools you are considering. You might actually discover some schools that you should be looking at that you hadn’t previously been aware of.
Sources:
Len Lipkin
PSS Community