Compare schools nationwide

Education.com has made its SchoolFinder tool national! This tool allows you to compare information about schools in a certain area. You won't be able to get everything you need to know about a school here, but it's a start. It's available at http://www.schoolfinder.education.com .

You can do a city/state search, but I found it easier to search by zip code. I did a search for 27604 and got a map of schools in the area. There's also a list of the schools with checkboxes. Choose a few schools you want to look at and click the "Compare Selected Schools" button.

You'll notice that the list has both public and charter schools. The public school listings tend to have more information available than the charter schools. When I did a comparison of Brentwood Elementary (public) and Hope Elementary (charter) I was able to get the following information about Brentwood: the enrollment, the number of students per teachers, whether the school has met its Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) goals, and ethnicity breakdown of the students. Hope provided none of this information. There was space for, but neither school provided information for, percentage of students on free and reduced-price lunch, and the number of fully-credentialed teachers and the average number of years teaching. I did some additional searching and the charter schools pretty much always had less data than the public schools, but the schools varied a lot on what information was available.

After you're done comparing, don't forget to check out the individual school pages, which you can get by clicking on the school name. Here's the one for Brentwood Elementary. This page provides a summary of school information through a series of tabs. Here you can get address (physical and Web) information for a school, a variety of student/teacher statistics with state averages for comparison, and (sometimes) test score information, comparing school, district, and state.

There's also a tab for parents to rate and provide reviews of schools. That would be a great item to add to the statistical information, but unfortunately none of the schools I looked at had reviews! I hope that as this resource has only recently gone national, it'll be adding more parent reviews soon.

But for right now the site contains mostly statistical information with the added ability to map and compare schools. That will not by any means give you the full picture of a school. But you can follow up here by visiting school Web sites and checking out district and state averages of school demographics. Add one more R to Readin', Ritin', and 'Rithmatic -- Research!