Americans are looking for schools they can trust. A Gallup poll last month revealed that confidence in public schools is at a 40-year low — only 29% of respondents expressed “a great deal” of confidence in the public education system.

Increasing numbers of students are opting out of their neighborhood schools and into the chaotic, nascent marketplace of school choice. Parents, the consumers in this new marketplace, need information to figure out what a healthy, high-functioning learning environment actually looks like.

But the elusive recipe for school success is extremely difficult to convey simply and clearly — something Bill Jackson knows all too well.

GreatSchools collects school ratings to help parents make informed decisions about their children's education.

Back in 1998, when the concept of school choice was still in its infancy, Jackson founded the website GreatSchools to help parents become more effectively involved in their children’s education. Today, GreatSchools is the country’s leading source of information on school performance, with listings of 200,000 public and private schools, more than one million parent ratings and reviews, and over 40 million unique visitors a year, including nearly half of all American parents of school-aged children.

Each school’s 10-point score on GreatSchools is currently determined by a single measure: “its performance on state standardized tests,” following in the vein of the 2001 No Child Left Behind law. This rating system has been easy to use and communicate to parents.

Yet as time went on and Jackson and his colleagues delved deeper into the mystery of what defines a great school, they realized that test scores were valuable — and overvalued.

Jackson hired Samantha Brown Olivieri, a former educator and self-styled “data diva”, and charged her with leading the process of devising a more balanced ratings system for schools. This October, that system will debut in two cities — Indianapolis, Indiana, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Eventually, it will be applied nationwide.

Five marks of healthy school culture

As Olivieri explains it, the new system reflects an observation that is both simple and significant: kids’ performance in the classroom depends on the overall quality of the school’s climate and culture. “We want parents to find not just a great school, but also the best possible fit for their child — and that’s tricky,” Olivieri says. “It’s a lot harder to measure qualitative data in a way that’s consistent and useful.”

Olivieri and her colleagues devised a five-part portrait of school climate and culture:

1. Robust teacher support;
2. Active family engagement;
3. Supportive environmental conditions;
4. Strong social and emotional student growth; and
5. A school-wide climate of high expectations 
   

Together, these five criteria will help GreatSchools to identify schools that foster a broad set of skills, in addition to producing high test scores.

“We’re trying different things out right now through this pilot,” Olivieri explained, “and we’re searching for what will be both credible and actionable. Part of the challenge is that most parents do not have a depth of experience on which to rely. When people rate a restaurant on Yelp, they do so after attending hundreds of restaurants. But that’s not generally how it works with schools; for most of us, the range of reference is quite limited.”

It is, in short, a brave new world, but it’s one that Jackson and Olivieri feel will help GreatSchools fulfill its goal of helping parents make better, more informed decisions about where to send their children to school.

“It’s true that education is not a field that can easily measure the most valuable outcomes,” Olivieri said. “It’s a challenge — but it’s an exciting challenge, and I’m excited to see what we can learn — and how we can help.”

Written by Sam Chaltain, a veteran educator who works with Ashoka’s empathy team.