School Researching Tips

From Tip Sense

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1 Introduction
2 General Audience
3 Quick Tips
4 Sources/References
5 Authors

Introduction

Are you going to have a kid at your home who is turning 5 this summer? May be you are also a parent who is curious to investigate school options around your area of accessibility. I have done some research when my son was about to go to school. Since we live in Issaquah, WA that's why I provided reference around my locality. Note though the process should be same no matter which locality you live in USA. Feel free to go through these Tips and either update them for more information or if you have any questions ask me through this wiki by contacting Narendra.

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General Audience

Definitely this Tip Article is targeted to parents who will have either:

Their first offspring ready for school.
Or they are taking a transfer from another area and want to investigate schools.

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Quick Tips

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Where to start?

Your first bet is to check with Department of Education for the state you live. This is *the* place where you will find numerous resources that can lead you to the right direction. So for example if you are in state of Washington here is the link to website for Superintendent of Public Instruction . You don’t need to bookmark this site so long as you have bookmarked Tip Sense. For an easy reference I am providing below links to Superintendent of Public Instruction websites for few other states.

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What to look for?

Note that Public Instruction websites will offer plenty of resources. And somewhere each should list all school districts that are available. For state of Washington here is the list of all School Districts. As an example I was looking for something in my locality and this is where I found link to the school district that I care Issaquah. Well we are one step closer, above mentioned links could be used to extract more resources when in need and when you have more time. For convenience they are also provided in Sources section below the article.

Note that each state should have a State Report Card publicly available, where you can look at test scores for a particular school districts. For example following link provide a graphical chart for third to seventh grade for Issaquah School District. If you were looking for a new house to relocate, may be you can use this site to find out which school district is doing good as for as test score and other development of students are concerned.

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OK Found School District now what?

School District website of your area provide extensive information about all schools that are in the District. Though note that mostly they don’t provide detailed comparisons of different schools within the same district. For this you may have to look elsewhere. For state of Washington here is the link to online tool which can give you detailed point by point comparison between different schools including private ones. So you can compare apple to apple.

As an example if my son had two options to go in Issaquah School District one is Challenger Elementary and other is Endeavour Elementary, they both looked right to me however I can always find out more details at Washington State Report Card website to see how students had been doing from both schools. Picture above shows graphical comparison for both school for year 2006-2007.

Chart for Issaqush School District for 2006-2007

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Tools of comparison

Sorry I could only found comparison tools for State of Washington but I am certain that for other states too there should be online tools that can compare selected schools on various matrix. So well in Issaquah School District I have two options for Elementary school and I used online tool (thanks to Seattle Times) to compare the two and if you click the link below you can easily notice the results. From the comparison it seem there is not much difference in two schools. However note that you can always dig further to explore as shown below in pictures.