School rating accuracy?

Question

What sites or services can I use to accurately get a school's academic grade?  Realtor.com uses greatschools to ratw and I have heard people use niche.com but those numbers seem arbitrary.  Also, other than contacting the agent, is there a way to determine the zoned public school by address?  Thanks in advance, BP community!

Anna Laud · Answer

@Arthur Sorochkin

Hi Arthur!

One of the best and most accurate places to find this information out would be from your State's Department of Education. Usually there are 'report card' grades given out to each school within the State and these are based on various State metrics, from population size, to standardized testing results, literacy rates averaging above/below grade level etc.

The State page/site should offer you the most accurate and easy to understand results, they may even have a few Federal level rankings listed out as well if this applies to any of the schools you're looking at.

I will give you the link for Indiana's site, just so you can see what I mean

https://inview.doe.in.gov/   - try typing in 'North Central High School' and you will clearly see the State issued 'report card'- you can use this as an example of what at least one State (IN) considers information worth noting and use it to kind of base your own search on until you find your State's direct page.

As for finding out a property's 'zoned' school(s) you will need to do a google search with the following terms;

The exact "school corporation name" (often City/Township combo) + "school boundary map"

Usually two to three links will be above the one you're looking for as those top result are PPC ads (like from sites you mentioned) then below those you should see ".gov" ".org" or something State/district specific like "in.us" but it's likely not going to come from a ".com" location if an official State or public school site (which is what you want as redistricting happens often and the State's site will only be second in accuracy after the school district's site.

If rezoning is of serious concern for you, cross reference with another search of again "exact school corporation name" + "school board meeting" + "redistricting" - you should easily have access then to any published school board meetings- super sleuthing would be to go through the "minuets" of the meetings to look for key words to determine the mention of and projected  dates/effected schools.

Hope that helps!

Arthur Sorochkin · Answer

@Anna Laud Thank you so much for the comprehensive reply!!