More tools to find data to compare local schools

There are plenty of resources on the Web for data to help reporting on local schools — as long as you know where to look. Katherine Boehret of the Wall Street Journal reviews three good sites for education research: Education.com, GreatSchools.net and SchoolMatters.com.

Education.com includes a school finder feature that lets users compare public and charter schools (from elementary through high school). The site currently only has data from California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas, but it says other states will be added soon. The older GreatSchools.net has a similar feature, but it has all 50 states and it includes some information on private schools. (I searched for my Catholic grade school and found teacher-to-student ratio, some parents' reviews and an overview.) While the other two sites also include articles on education and children, SchoolMatters.com focuses on data and users can find plenty.

"Both Education.com and GreatSchools.net base a good portion of their data on information gathered by the Department of Education and the National Center for Education Statistics, the government entity that collects and analyzes data related to education," Boehret explains. "SchoolMatters.com, a service of Standard & Poor's, is more bare-bones, containing quick statistical comparisons of schools. (S&P is a unit of McGraw-Hill Cos.) This site gets its content from various sources, including state departments of education, private research firms, the Census and National Public Education Finance Survey." (Read more)

Another useful site is SchoolDataDirect.org, sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The site offers current national, state and local information on schools, including test scores, finances and demographics. The downside, however, is the site is not geared to journalists and seems to discourage reporters from using it too often. A disclaimer on the site reads: "If you are not associated with an academic institution or nonprofit organization you may only reproduce, distribute, display, or transmit de minimus amounts of Education Data on an infrequent basis and only for noncommercial purposes."