Back-to-School Special: 5 Tips on Picking Good Schools

Thursday, Aug. 04, 2011

By Andrew J. Rotherham

I'm a policy guy, not a daddy blogger. As a general rule, I don't discuss my children in this column or on my Eduwonk blog, but when TIME asked me to write about how my wife (who also works in education) and I chose our kids' elementary school, I figured why not. We are constantly besieged by friends and colleagues about how we went about picking a school, as if there was some secret education-analyst methodology I was privy to. I wish that were true! But even though I don't have access to the secret sauce, I do have a pretty good sense of how to kick a school's tires. Plus, I think it would be a shame not to use all of our parental angst for the greater good. And so, as our kids start a new year at a public school, here are some lessons from our school-hunting experience that might help guide yours.

Look beneath the label. "Public" or "private" doesn't really tell you very much, so don't scratch a school off your list just because of how it's governed. There are terrific and lousy schools in the public, private and (publicly funded) charter school sectors, so relying on labels alone is a big risk. Likewise, you should do more than glance at a school's test scores or demographic data. My wife and I, for instance, are both products of public schools. I went to ones in Virginia that on paper were both excellent and diverse, but in practice there were different tracks for different kids, so most of the kids in my gifted or AP classes looked like me — Caucasian, middle-class, rugged good looks. Well, two out of three of those anyway. My wife grew up in an Ohio district known for great academics but with no diversity. As our kids approached school age, we hoped to find a good school that was racially, ethnically and also economically diverse — which is a tall order given today's housing patterns and school boundaries. But more important than anything else, we wanted to find the right fit for our kids, so we were not opposed to going private if we couldn't find an option in the public sector that seemed to work for us.(See the 20 best- and worst-paid college majors.)

We started by attending the orientation sessions and school fairs. But frankly, making your choice based on those events alone is akin to marrying someone you just met in a bar. So we went online to get data from the school system about school demographics and student performance and from greatschools.net, which compiles data and school reviews from parents. We also talked to friends and neighbors whose kids attended local schools, and asked teachers we encountered where they would try to send their own kids if they could and to speak candidly about various schools. And we talked to kids, whose perspective is invaluable because they live it every day. It was a lot of work, but we learned a lot too, and that was just the warm-up phase.

Go for a test-drive. Visit the schools you're interested in during a regular school day. Ask to observe teachers in class so you can get a feel for how the adults treat the kids, parents, and each other. You don't have to be an expert to get a good sense of what is — or isn't — happening in a classroom when you visit. Be unobtrusive, blend in, and everyone will forget you are there. Are the students being engaged by the teacher? Does the teacher check for understanding as he or she teaches? If the students are working in small groups, are they on task or chattering away about Selena Gomez? Can the teachers talk with you after class about the curriculum and how they make decisions and set expectations? Perhaps most fundamental is whether the classroom is a place you'd want to spend time in. Also, don't just visit the grade your child is entering; visit a few other grades, too, so you can really get a sense of the place. (Read about life after high school.)

My wife and I made these visits this separately and then compared notes afterwards, discussing where we agreed and disagreed. It's less time-consuming than it sounds, and even after a decade of marriage, we learned a lot about each other during this process. Surprisingly, our sit-in approach quickly eliminated the most coveted public school near our house because its administrators forbid classroom visits except for the ones during the comically inept tours the school gives (literally a conga line of parents snaking through the school). We figured — correctly, it appears, based on the experiences of other families we've talked to — that if this was the attitude toward prospective parents, it wouldn't get any better once we actually enrolled.

Be diligent, but don't go overboard. We commiserated with friends who are doctors and nurses that sometimes too much information is a curse and wondered how they ever endured a trip to the doctor's themselves. "Paralysis by analysis," as they say in my line of work. More than once we had to remind ourselves that every little thing didn't matter; the big picture did. No school is perfect, and if you go looking for perfection, you'll end up disappointed and needlessly anxious about your child's education. Likewise, once you've made your choice, don't check out, but you do have to trust the professionals at the school.

Trust your instincts. In the end, we settled on the school that had been our romantic preference from the start: our neighborhood school. It's a relatively small school, and as a bonus it has a good language program. The principal and assistant principal are great — and refreshingly transparent as we were choosing. They said stop in anytime to observe class, and they meant it. It's a very diverse school (more than half the kids are low-income and it's a majority minority student body) and not surprisingly has its challenges. So we know we're committing ourselves to a different level of engagement and support for our kids, but that's okay given the richness of the experience the school provides and also given that we're in a position to provide that higher level of engagement and support. (Read how good grades in school affect health.)

What your child needs matters most, so after you do all your homework, go with your gut, not the herd. The book Picky Parent Guide, which is now available for free online, is a great resource for how to do that.

Keep pushing for more choices. In this country, the norm for a long time has been to send your kids to your neighborhood school. You didn't have any other options. That's starting to change a little in some places where kids can now to go to another school or enter a lottery if there are more students who want to attend than there are empty seats. But the amount of choice is still limited by administrators (who alone get to decide, for instance, whether to open a second Montessori-style school in a district even if the first one always has an insanely long wait list) and legislators (who can do things like refuse to let charter schools into districts like the one I live in). Our school district does offer some choice, but it's called"controlled choice" — we were only able to pick and choose from a subset of the district's schools. But at the very least this means that if our choice turns out to be a bad one, we can choose another public school in this little subset. Or we could opt to go private. Yet these choices are still elusive for far too many parents because of economics as well as education laws and policies. It's amazing how routine it has become in public education to deny people choices and power. Giving more Americans this kind of empowerment matters to my wife and me out of basic fairness, but it also matters because in ways large and small our fate is bound up with the millions of parents around the country growing frustrated with our public system. We need them to support public schools when they go to voting booths just as much as we need their kids to grow into productive citizens.

In other words, so far it's worked out for us, but I'm left struck — as both analyst and parent — by how much public education, an institution that is predicated on a common understanding of the collective good, does things to undermine the very support it's dependent on to thrive. I worry about this and what it means for our country a lot more than I do about how my kids will do in school this year. And you should too.

Andrew J. Rotherham, who writes the blog Eduwonk, is a co-founder and partner at Bellwether Education, a nonprofit working to improve educational outcomes for low-income students. School of Thought, his education column for TIME.com, appears every Thursday.