Photo by Marco / Zak on Flickr.

For many DC parents trying to choose a public school, facts about test scores and demographics aren’t enough. They want to know what a school feels like. That information is available for many charter schools, but it’s spotty and hard to find.

Parents often have to rely on hearsay about factors like school culture, workload, and student behavior when evaluating schools, or rely on relatively brief school tours. As a result, many gravitate toward the same handful of schools with too few open spots.

The Public Charter School Board (PCSB) used to include this qualitative information in its reports on schools. But now the board generally does it only once every 5 years. To be truly helpful to parents, this kind of evaluation needs to happen more frequently, for DCPS schools as well as charters.

With the advent of a common lottery, parents have to be more thoughtful than ever about the process of identifying schools for their children. That’s because they need to rank their choices rather than just applying to a bunch of schools and then deciding later which one they like best. But how can they be sure that one school is better suited to their needs than another?

The limits of data

The My School DC website website provides information about schools so parents can compare data about academic achievement, demographics, and program offerings. Additional quantitative information is available at other sites.

But a school’s test scores don’t tell us whether a school is effectively implementing the curriculum it claims to use. Similarly, the number of suspensions doesn’t tell us if there is a general sense of order or disruption in classrooms.

In my research about schools, I found one resource that provides a glimpse of what a good qualitative evaluation system could offer. The PCSB website includes links to annual School Performance Reports for each public charter school from 2008 to 2013 (with no reports posted for 2010). The reports from 2008 and 2009 were full of valuable narrative analysis. But the reports from 2011 to 2013, while graphically striking, were much less helpful.

Qualitative reports

Those older reports included paragraphs on Curriculum and Standards, Instruction, Assessment, School Climate, and Governance. The comments, based on two half-day visits by a team of consultants, were quite candid in pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each school’s programs.

For example, the 2009 report for E.L. Haynes’ elementary school found that science was one part of the curriculum where the school’s mission had “yet to be realized.” As a Haynes parent without a strong background in science, I appreciated this professional perspective. But because later reports didn’t include this kind of information, there was no follow-up to reassure me or prospective parents that the situation had improved.

While they’re helpful, the older reports don’t always address inconsistencies or changes from year to year. The 2008 report on Washington Latin’s middle school said that “safety and orderliness were not clearly in evidence,” and “clear behavioral expectations were not enforced.” The following year, though, the report said that the same school offered “a safe and orderly environment.”

It’s possible that the 2008 evaluators just visited Latin on two bad half-days (perhaps rainy days with no recess time), but the 2009 report suggests the school figured out a way to enforce its high behavioral expectations. That would have been good news for prospective parents—and even better if later reports of this kind existed to confirm it.

According to a spokesperson from the PCSB, one result of the shift from the narrative style of School Performance Reports to the quantitative style is greater uniformity and consistency across the reviews for all schools. But last year, the chartering authority began issuing Qualitative Site Review (QSR) Reports for schools whose charters are up for renewal at five-year intervals. Low-performing charters get shorter versions of these reviews yearly.

According to PCSB Deputy Director Naomi DeVeaux, the QSRs are primarily intended to help the schools in reaching their goals rather than to guide parents in their school choices. But the reports are available to parents who take the time to track them down.

The QSRs are tucked away under the Data Center/Oversight tab, far less eye-catching than the colorful link to the School Performance Reports on the home page. The PCSB takes even more care with the QSRs than with the old qualitative reports, basing them on school visits—many of them surprise visits—over the course of two weeks.

Because the reports are usually issued only once every 5 years, not every school has a current report. There is a 2014 report for E.L. Haynes, but parents looking for qualitative data about Washington Latin will have to wait until 2015, when its charter is up for review.

Expert observers

I find the QSRs informative and only wish something equivalent existed for every school on an annual basis. Professional evaluators have a valuable perspective because they visit and compare multiple schools and have knowledge that most parents lack.

Quantitative data is crucial in the current educational climate, but numbers and fancy graphics never tell the whole story. If qualitative reports were available about all DCPS and charter schools, every year, it would offer parents a meaningful way to rank their school choices in the lottery and perhaps give them the confidence to try out an unfamiliar school.

More importantly, such reports could drive improvement within schools so that all children will ultimately “win the lottery.”