My Yahoo!Finance column that posts on May 23 offers tips on getting the best value out of your home purchase. For parents, of course, perhaps the most important aspect of the search is the quality of local schools.
As I mention in the column, start your school search with a website such as greatchools.net and schoolmatters.com, which offer data on school size, class size, household income, household education levels, ethnicity, number of single-parent households, district expenditure per student, teachers’ educational achievement, performance on state tests, and percentage of students who go on to college.
Double check what these sites say about class size. I noticed schoolmatters.com stated that a school near me had 12 students in a classroom, when the school web site said the number was 20. States may report smaller class sizes because they are dividing the number of children by all instructional staff – including reading or math tutors, teachers’ aides, etc.
When you’re looking at instructional staff, especially at the high school level, ask how many teachers are certified in the subject area they are teaching. Also ask about trends in test scores, says Susan Shafer, director of marketing communications, for School Evaluation Services at Standard and Poor’s. “A spike in reading scores might be because they changed the test,” she says. Look at the financial data for the district and state, and see where the money is being spent – on administration, teachers in the classroom, buildings, etc.
Go beyond school rankings in the media. Newsweek, for example, assembles its annual “best high schools” list (just out this week) based in part on the number of students who take and pass Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) exams – courses designed to replace introductory-level college courses. Yet 40 percent of U.S. high schools don’t offer AP courses, and some highly regarded school districts are eliminating them.
Meanwhile, “just because school ranked doesn’t mean it’s going to be best for your child,” says Shafer. “We try and focus on how well a school serves kid at every level – how well they are educating kids on the bottom and kids in the middle as well as the top.”
Look at the school’s web site, and see if extra curricular offerings jibe with your child’s abilities – whether its sports programs or a chess club, she suggests. “The biggest mistake is listening too much to what other people say,” she says. “Don’t go by the fact that people say it’s a good school. You have to do your own homework.”
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