Home Prices Sure to Reflect New School Ratings
A dramatic new chapter in California school reform begins Tuesday. And other than schools, home sales may feel the biggest impact.
Real estate agents should benefit along with school kids.
For the first time, practically every public school will be rated on a scale of 1 to 10--one meaning wretched, 10 denoting near-perfection. From bottom-of-the-barrel to as-good-as-it-gets.
Pretty simple. The ed community-- bureaucrats, lobbyists, some principals and teachers--may try to make it sound more complicated than that. There’ll be a lot of yes, buts and on the other hands. The essential numbers to keep in mind, however, are 1 to 10. Because that’s what the public will focus on, especially anybody looking to buy into a neighborhood.
“School quality is the No. 1 concern of people with school-age children,” notes Barbara Blake, owner of Burbank-based Quest Relocation Group, which helps corporate executives transferred into the L.A. area find housing. “Now, there’ll be a number that people can understand--1 through 10.”
Blake thinks the ratings will particularly help sell homes in L.A. Unified, where some schools are outstanding despite the district’s dismal reputation. Starting Tuesday, each school will have its own simple ranking.
“A Realtor will be able to tell a client,” Blake says, “ ‘You’ve heard that Beverly Hills has good schools. Well, this one has the same number ranking.’ ”
Or: Better forget it here. Let’s look someplace else.
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This is how it will work:
At 10 o’clock Tuesday morning, the California Department of Education promises to post the school rankings on its Web site https://www.cde.ca.gov/psaa. People who don’t have Internet access can call their local school districts.
Internet users will tap their district’s name into a search site, then look for a school. There’ll be several columns of numbers. Column 3 will list the school’s 1 to 10 ranking, as compared to other elementary, middle or high schools statewide.
The fourth column will contain another valuable 1 to 10 ranking: how this school stacks up against schools of similar ethnic and socioeconomic characteristics.
After that, the figures get slightly more complicated. The key number for educators is the school’s API (Academic Performance Index), which is on a scale of 200 to 1,000.
The 1 to 10 rankings are based on the APIs. And the APIs are based on 10 hours of tests students were required to take last spring. There’ll be more tests this spring and, for the first time, schools will be asked to meet API performance targets. Those target numbers also are listed in the Web site columns.
Schools and teachers who meet their targets will be rewarded with extra money. Schools that don’t will be leaned on--maybe a principal fired or, ultimately, a campus taken over by the state.
“There’s a lot of trepidation in the schools, but this is the kind of information we need,” says Delaine Eastin, state superintendent of public instruction. “If you’re in a bottom decile, there ought to be alarms going off. Even if you’re a 4-5-6-7, there ought to be a full-court press for improvement.”
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The rankings are crucial to California’s school reform, which began in earnest under former Gov. Pete Wilson and escalated last year with Gov. Gray Davis. This is the vital accountability piece of reform.
Critics complain the tests aren’t sophisticated enough yet to measure students’ mastery of California’s tough new academic standards. The rankings also don’t take into account such factors as dropout and graduation rates. These things will take a few years. Meanwhile, this is a good start--about a 7.
“Every time we try to do something perfect it just delays implementation,” says Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Dede Alpert (D-Coronado), who sponsored the bill for Davis. “The public was not going to wait any longer.”
Some people will be agitated by their local school’s rankings. And that’s good.
“Parents generally get worked up over the right issues,” says Assembly Education Chairwoman Kerry Mazzoni (D-San Rafael), a former school board member. The “classic example,” she notes, was when parents rebelled against whole language reading instruction.
Meanwhile, Shirley Saltman, an agent for El Dorado Realty in Long Beach, says: “You can be sure I’ll take advantage of this. If a school’s got a 9 or a 10, it’s going in my ad.” A good school, she says, can be worth $50,000 to a home.
A homeowner’s tax investment in local schools pays off not only in the classroom, but in escrow.
