It's not easy to find objective ratings and reviews for public schools. While there are several independent websites that rate schools, they're often contradictory and difficult to decipher. So to get the full story, you spend time scouring multiple school review sites to determine a consensus of the ratings they provide for each school.
On each of our Atlanta School Guides we've done the legwork for you. And we provide a simple, yet effective, thumbs up/thumbs down rating system designed to give you an "at a glance" review of the school serving a given neighborhood or community.
Keen Team "Thumbs Up" Rating
We crunch the data from three different independent rating sites: GreatSchools, Niche K-12, and SchoolDigger and proivde an "at a glance" rating of each school. A "Thumbs Up" rating from The Keen Team indicates the school earned, at minimum, a B- grade on Niche.com and a 5 or better ranking on GreatSchools.com
Keen Team "Thumbs Down" Rating
We crunch the data from three different independent rating sites: GreatSchools, Niche K-12, and SchoolDigger and proivde an "at a glance" rating of each school. A "Thumbs Down" rating from The Keen Team indicates the school earned, at most, a C+ grade on Niche.com and ranking less than 5 on GreatSchools.com
Below is an explanation of each of these ratings, as explained by their respective providers:
Overall Niche Grade
Grades are assigned based on how each school or district performs compared to all other schools included in the ranking by using the following distribution of grades and z-scores. While most rankings generally follow this normal distribution, there are slight variances across each ranking, so the actual counts and distribution may vary. Learn more.
GreatSchools Rating
The GreatSchools Rating is a simple tool that helps you compare schools based on test scores and other available data, including student academic growth and college readiness. GreatSchools is always working to improve the rating and add more information when state education agencies make school quality data publically available. The GreatSchools Rating is on a 1-10 scale, where 10 is the highest and 1 is the lowest. Ratings are broken down into three categories: ratings 1-3 signal that the school is “below average,” 4-7 indicate “average,” and 8-10 are “above average.” Ratings for these categories are shown in red, yellow and green (respectively) to help you see the distinctions. Learn more.
SchoolDigger Rating
SchoolDigger doesn't go into much detail to reveal how they rate schools, other than to say, "Schools, districts, and cities in the top 10% of the ranking list get five stars." Then they break down the remaining star ratings in the following manner:
90-100% - 5 Stars
70-90% - 4 Stars
50-70% - 3 Stars
30-50% - 2 Stars
10-30% - 1 Star
0-10% - 0 Stars
Learn more.
We know you'll agree that our Atlanta School Guide makes finding the best school and home for your family easy. And you can always contact us if you need help.
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