The popular school ratings website Greatschools.org offers a one-to-ten rating on each school in its system, and recently that rating system was given an overhaul to provide a more nuanced view of school quality. However, in a piece by Marketplace, assistant professor of education, and Director of Research at the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment, Jack Schneider argued it is still not nuanced enough because it relies so heavily on test scores.
“Schools are not monolithically good or bad,” Schneider told Marketplace. “They’re strong and weak in many different ways.”
These ratings are used in many real estate websites, including Trulia and Redfin, “which really walks a thin line between providing people with information and actually steering them in ways that lead to segregation,” Schneider said.
Read the full piece on Marketplace.
Schneider also weighed in on the efforts in upstate New York to address poverty and its effects on education in an article by the Altamont Enterprise Regional.