Frequently Asked Questions

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Where do you get the data about schools that fills your comparative rankings?

We usually depend on several sources, all of them issued by the California Department of Education. First, we turn toward the California Basic Educational Data System (CBEDS) data set from the Demographics Unit of the department. The Department of Education staff there consolidates information from all of California's 8,000 schools, gathered on one census day each October. We also obtain information from other units within the department, including the high school group, the language group, the assessment unit, the fiscal unit, and others. We supplement this foundation with resources from the government and nonprofit sectors.

How recent is this information?

It varies. The data can be as recent as last week, or as old as 18 months. Most of this is not under our control, but under the control of the California Department of Education. Because different data elements become available to us at different times throughout the year, we are constantly updating the ranking reports. Our goal is to publish our results within two weeks of the date the data becomes available from the California Department of Education. We perform four major updates a year in order to maintain this high level of data recency.

How do you add value to this publicly available data?

The way we intend to serve our customers best is by identifying relevant data, qualifying the sources, interpreting the data, putting it in the richest possible context of related information, presenting it in a way that's accessible and understandable to the greatest number of people, and publishing it as quickly as possible. In addition, we provide convenience to our readers by presenting all this information about California schools in one place and making it available to them 24 hours a day, every day of the year.

Don't school districts publish their own report cards, giving parents some school-level information?

They do. These are called School Accountability Report Cards, and they should be available from every school district office, for every school they're responsible for. These report cards (called SARCs, for short) are required by law. But they are of very uneven quality. (We've reviewed nearly a thousand of them.) We recommend that you consider them as you would product brochures: product specifications and marketing materials created by organizations for communicating to their customers. Of course, we recommend that you read them, but that you not rely on them alone for school information.

Are you connected to a nonprofit or an advocacy group, or are you affiliated with any political organization?

Definitely not. We're a commercial publisher, unaffiliated with any advocacy group or political party. We see ourselves as independent, third-party publishers much like any newspaper, magazine, or book publisher.

Why are you so interested in public school choice?

We believe that parents have a strong need for resources about schools when they are preparing to enroll their kids. Getting the news to parents about their right to choose schools and getting the facts about schools to parents are the goals we set initially. We also hope that this power to choose may soon become an effective force for school improvement. If our publishing program helps turn that hope into a reality, we'll consider our efforts well rewarded.

Are you going to be publishing books on other forms of school choice: vouchers, homeschooling, and charter schools?

We don't currently plan to publish books on any of these three subjects. But there are already a fair number of books in print on these topics, and we are offering these books for sale through our on-line book catalog.

Are you going to be doing this nationally?

California's a pretty big state, and we believe we have our work cut out for us here. However, we do hope to eventually expand our program to other states. We believe that the public's relation to its schools is a highly localized phenomenon. Not only are laws, policies, and traditions vastly different state by state, but people's attitudes and expectations differ as well. We believe we can only serve customers well with state-specific publishing programs and information services. So when we do grow, it will be on a state-by-state basis.

Do you plan to offer information in Spanish?

We are beginning translations into Spanish of selections from the most timely and important topic: testing. These translations are scheduled for August, and they will cover the questions designed to help parents understand their own children's test scores. As our resources allow, we hope to extend our translation services to other topics as well. Your suggestions for these topics are, of course, most welcome.

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