One of the things people consistently tell me when they are considering buying or renting a home in a new location is that they want to move somewhere with “good schools.” This always makes me wonder how we quantify what schools are considered “good”? To start you might look for information on school reputations or performance using local school data fact sheets from realtors or apartment managers or, more likely, by searching ranking and review sites such as Niche. This approach is generally fine but it assumes that you are only interested in a specific neighborhood which may be difficult to achieve right now in most major cities across the US and especially in Seattle.

What if instead we looked at all the neighborhood school ratings in a city simultaneously? This would allow the reader to spot trends and make visual comparisons as well as possibly identify overperforming schools in unexpected areas. Fortunately, Seattle Public Schools (SPS) provides quite a lot of data about their schools which makes this easy to visualize.

Setup

• For this analysis I just the SPS data for the 2016-17 school year.

• I focused solely on elementary school data for the 2016-17 school year. I used the SPS district boundary map for all public elementary schools in the City of Seattle and ignored any magnet or alternative elementary schools.

Rankings

Initially I focused on three questions:

• What school has the best student/teacher ratio?
• What school reports the best attendance?
• What schools are best for reading and math?

I took the SPS data for student/teacher ratio, attendance rate, and reading and math proficiency scores for each school and calculated their rank within the city to make this table. Click on the category name to sort by that category.

School Name	Attendance Rank	Student/Teacher Ratio Rank	Grade 3 Math Rank	Grade 3 Reading Rank
Adams	12	53	29	21
Alki	20	35	12	15
Arbor Heights	21	31	45	33
Gatzert	42	4	49	56
Beacon Hill Int’l	1	32.50	30	37
B.F. Day	16	43	25	23
Broadview-Thomson K-8	49	2	46	45
Bryant	6	55	3	4
Cascadia	2	59	1	1
Catharine Blaine K-8	38	15	6	13
Concord Int’l	44	22	59	60
Bagley	10	20	24	19
Dearborn Park Int’l	61	61	61	61
Dunlap	43	5	56	55
Emerson	58	14	43	53
Fairmount Park	22	47	2	3
Coe	9	48	10	9
Gatewood	35	26	33	40
Genesee Hill	24	50	16	20
Graham Hill	39	10	55	49
Green Lake	31	37	26	28
Greenwood	15	54	20	17
Hawthorne	46	16	48	41
Highland Park	48	6	57	50
Hay	8	38	19	10
John Muir	23	25	52	48
John Rogers	33	24	34	34
Kimball	30	32.50	40	36
Lafayette	29	44	27	25
Laurelhurst	34	49	15	24
Lawton	26	42	4	6
Leschi	53	36	37	44
Lowell	60	3	58	54
Loyal Heights	17	58	5	7
Madrona	52	1	47	43
Maple	19	28	31	32
MLK Jr.	45	8	54	58
McDonald International	7	30	23	2
McGilvra	25	40	14	11
Montlake	37	51	9	16
North Beach	14	46	13	12
Northgate	51	11	50	51
Olympic Hills	41	34	21	30
Olympic View	27	56	32	29
Queen Anne	28	57	28	22
Rainier View	55	21	18	26
Roxhill	56	13	53	57
Sacajawea	36	7	42	42
Sand Point	47	27	39	35
Sanislo	57	12	60	59
Stevens	32	29	35	31
Thornton Creek	18	17	41	38
Thurgood Marshall	5	39	8	18
Van Asselt	59	9	51	52
Viewlands	40	19	44	47
View Ridge	3	52	11	5
Wedgwood	11	41	7	14
West Seattle Elem	54	23	38	46
West Woodland	13	45	17	8
Whittier	4	60	22	27
Wing Luke	50	18	36	39
Schmitz Park	62	62	62	62

What jumps out at me most is that no particular school consistently out-performs the others, which can make it challenging to decide what to prioritize when choosing a school.

Student/Teacher ratio

Each school reports the number of enrolled students and the number of teachers which I simply used to calculate a ratio.

Click on an attendance area for the exact percentage.

Attendance

I was initially interested in student attendance data, but the elementary school with the lowest daily attendance was Lowell Elementary with an attendance rate of 89%. Every other school reported an attendance rate at or above 95% which did not make for a very interesting map. I later learned that Washington State has a compulsory attendance law which likely affected these numbers.

Reading proficiency

I was interested in looking at district-wide third grade reading achievement scores district-wide for 3rd graders as measured by the Washington State proficiency test. I chose third grade because that is the first year a Washington State standardized test is administered for reading.

Click on an attendance area for the exact percentage.

Math proficiency

Similarly, I looked at the district-wide third grade math achievement scores as measured by the Washington State proficiency test

Click on an attendance area for the exact percentage.

Family engagement

SPS provides a parent survey with a variety of questions evaluating parent enthusiasm and approval of Seattle schools. These survey results are not published, so I looked at how many families completed these surveys for the 2016-17 school year.

Click on an attendance area for the exact percentage.

Even the school with the most responses reported that only 49.1% of families responded to the survey which to me means that most families are satisfied with their school but neither especially excited or disappointed by their school experiences.

tl;dr Choosing a school is hard but ultimately it comes down to how satisfied the parents or guardians are with the school. Schools report on a wide array of metrics about student performance, but performance is often an issue of secondary importance when compared to parents’ overall perception of the school quality.