How online ratings make good schools look bad

GreatSchools is America’s biggest school ratings website. But what do its scores actually measure?

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When parents are researching where to move, they typically look at the quality of a neighborhood's schools. But good data on that is hard to find. That's where a website called GreatSchools has thrived. GreatSchools rates almost every public school in America on a scale of 1 to 10. But when we analyzed those ratings, we found that they almost never give high scores to schools in poor neighborhoods — even though data from their own website shows that many of those schools do a good job teaching students.

This video is a collaboration with Chalkbeat, an education news site. To read more about GreatSchools' ratings, read their story here:

EdWeek reported on how GreatSchools changed its ratings system in 2017:

And recently, researchers have found that the GreatSchools ratings may even have an effect on housing prices, locking poor people out of more affluent neighborhoods:

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