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List of resources for investigating/evaluating schools
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Lab
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Hello all. I am trying to compile a list of resources for researching schools. I ran a few searches in this forum and could not find any collection of suggestions, so I figured I'd start my own. Below is what I have turned up so far (in no particular order). If I missed a comprehensive list that someone's already posted, could you please point me there? If not, please add any other good sources I have missed. Also, if you know of sources that stink (meaning they're not reliable), please let me know too so I can ignore them. My own focus is on private schools, but this list is not intended to be limited to private schools.
(1) Your own personal impressions from school visits. These first-hand impressions are clearly going to be best, although I suppose most schools will "put best foot forward" in prospective student meetings, so take it all with a grain of salt. (2) Advice from friends and neighbors whose kids have attended the school. This will be a pretty good source since you will get the inside scoop from someone in the know. Also, you will know whether your friend is a good evaluator or not. You also can ask questions. There could be some sugar-coating because most people tend to want to think their own choices are good ones, so many parents may emphasize the positive aspects of their school while minimizing the negatives. (3) DCUM forums. This forum has some of the best info I have found yet. Lots of different viewpoints and lots of experience are represented here. I am happily amazed at how much energy & info some people put into their posts. My only complaint would be the amount of snark and nastiness I have to wade through to dig out the good stuff. (If you're tempted to add to the snark, please go get a cup of coffee instead.) (4) Great schools.net. Some useful reviews there, but lots of gaps in info. Also, since it's a national website, it does not have much focus on DC/MD/VA schools. (5) Your neighborhood email list/website. My neighborhood has one, and I should probably post something there for advice/input. However, I don't know if I'm too keen on hearing all my neighbors tell me which schools my kids should and should not attend. They would have good advice, but it might be hard to turn some of them off. (6) http://www.washingtonlife.com/backissues/archives/01sept/schools.htm. I turned this up in a web search. It has some generalized info, but not too much. (7) Each individual school's website. This is a good source for factual info about the school, but it's all clearly biased, so hard to give it too much weight. Every school website tells you it's the best for your child. Also, although I am as impressed by a good website as the next person (and turned off by bad ones), I need to be careful not to give the good website any significant weight in selecting schools since my kids would not be attending the website. I suppose though that having a useful website might be slightly indicative of how good a school is at communicating with parents, or perhaps just indicative of having hired a good website designer. (8) Websites with bare lists of schools, their addresses, grade levels, tuition costs, etc. There are many lists out there, but I am not including them here since they don't add much besides aggregating what is on each individual school's website. Beware also that many of these lists get out-of-date quickly. (9) http://www.bethesdamagazine.com/sept05/private.php. A fairly bare-bones list of basic school info, but a little bit of description too. I was hoping to find some site like Epinions for schools in DC, but no luck. Maybe someone else knows of one. I also was thinking that there might be other message boards like this one with good info, but this board appears to be fairly unique. Again, if anyone knows of other sources, please post. Thanks for any input. |
Anonymous
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I would not trust anonymous voices on DCUM.
School consultant Georgia Irvin wrote a good book on schools in the area, which was updated a couple of years ago. That might be worth checking out. |
Anonymous
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When I was trying to get more info on the school my daughter wanted to go to, I tried internet searches of the sentence "I love (selected school)" or "I hate (selected school)." (Note that you have to use double quotes around the phrase if you want the search engine to find the exact phrase.) Found some interesting things that way. But then I was looking for info on a high school and was looking for parents' and young adults' responses.
I also got names and phone numbers of students who had left the school my dd wanted to attend in order to go to the school dd currently attended. I called those parents to find out why they had left. However, again I was helped in this by the fact that dd is a teenager and I was able to talk to the head of her department to get these family's names. |
Lab
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These are good thoughts. Thanks for the input. I checked out Georgia Irvin's book yesterday at the bookstore. While I found general discussion section at the front about keeping things in perspective, finding the right school fit for your child, etc to be pretty good, the discussion of individual schools was a little limited (not much more than a compilation of stats). I suppose that's unavoidable for an in-print book, since things change so much from year to year and there's a perceived need to give "equal time" to all schools without seeming to promote one over another. All-in-all, it's a good starting resource but if you are looking for in-depth discussion of particular schools, you likely will need to dig further. Great thought on asking students/families who left about their reasons; this would reduce the risk of getting sugar-coated responses (although perhaps increase the risk of bile-coated responses depending on reason for leaving!).
Finally, on the point about not trusting anonymous voices on DCUM, I totally agree that anonymous postings can only carry little weight. For all I know, there are only 3-4 nutcases who are just posting here anonymously without any basis in fact (and I'm one of them!). However, this is clearly the most active website I have found, so it's all I've got in terms of broad community-consensus research. My hope is that while I cannot trust any individual anonymous posting, I can have some trust in a variety of voices if they are all consistent. I'd really like to encourage regular contributors to sign up for a user-name and post under that name, instead of posting anonymously. That way, we all can start to recognize one another and better evaluate each others' opinions. I recognize that people value anonymity and that the DC parenting community is not a large one, but it's not like we're sharing deep, dark fantasies here -- just opinions on schools and education. If you want to post details about your sex life, your income, or your deepest prejudices, then you can easily log out and revert to anonymous for those posts. Keep the good ideas coming. Thanks again. |
Anonymous
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I just posted this to another thread, but here's an overview of DC charter schools with a summary of each school:
http://www.focusdc.org/charterschooldirectory/index.asp |