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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm a first time parent to a new rising PK3. We decided we don't know what we don't know, and we would just go with our local neighborhood in-bound for PK3, so this year's lottery wasn't too stressful for us. But it did get us starting to think about the process. It seems to me that none of the metrics I would actually care about for elementary schools are available online to help me compare schools.

I can go to myschooldc.org and easily find some basics - which schools are near me for what grades, school hours, and if there is after care. Some useless facts like whether there's a uniform or that they offer Zumba.

I can get some information on curriculum on the school or DCPS websites, but it makes it really hard to compare and contrast - they all essentially sound the same.

There's overall test scores - but that's kinda useless without more context (what year do they even take these?) I can see the racial and economic breakdown of the school, but not by year, which is basically useless in DCPS. I can't see any breakdown of which schools are actually seeing higher scores in different demographics, or [b]which schools are seeing the test scores for kids go up the longer they stay in their school. [/b]

What about hours of screen time by grade? Outdoor time by grade? Class size? Student to teacher ratios? Do you have to go to open houses to get all this basic info?

How are people actually researching schools? This seems impossible. And going by reputation or "what DCUM thinks" seems like a terrible way to pick a school. Are there resources I'm missing here?

(FWIW, this is essentially a spinoff of the FCPS thread about kinder kids each having their own iPads and other lower elementary kids having to cart chromebooks home to charge each night after spending all day on them (!) and I realized despite "school choice" in DC, I don't actually have the information I need to avoid schools like this.)[/quote]
I don't think this data exists, at least not publicly available.  I've never seen year-over-year data that controls for how many years students have been at that school.  [/quote]

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