How SchoolGrade Works
Every public school in the United States gets one letter grade, and next to it, a second reading that says how the school performs against what its circumstances would predict. This page explains both, what goes into them, and what they do not claim.
SchoolGrade
A single grade from A+ to F anchored in state test proficiency: the share of tested students at or above the state’s own proficiency bar. It is a measure of attainment, comparable between schools that sit the same state tests.
Actual vs. Projected
Actual is the school’s real proficiency rate. Projected is what our model expects for a school with this student body and community context. They appear side by side on every school page and every ranking.
Impact Grade
The gap between actual and projected, summarized in five labels: Greatly Exceeds, Exceeds, Meets, Doesn’t Meet, and Underperforms Expectations. It is a reading of the school’s contribution, not a judgment of any teacher.
A Methodologically Rigorous Alternative to Conventional School Metrics
Educational researchers have long recognized that raw standardized-test outcomes are often poor proxies for instructional quality. Decades of empirical work demonstrate that student performance is conditioned by a constellation of factors largely outside a school’s immediate influence, including family income, parental educational attainment, household language environment, disability prevalence, neighborhood stability and myriad community-level resource disparities.¹ In most U.S. jurisdictions, wealthier catchment areas also command higher per-pupil funding, further amplifying advantages already conferred by socioeconomic status. Consequently, schools embedded in affluent communities tend to post elevated test scores, not necessarily because they deploy superior pedagogical practices, but because their pupils arrive better resourced and more test-ready from the outset. The reciprocal is true for many high-poverty schools: even exemplary teaching may never suffice to “catch up” to the statistical uplift enjoyed by their wealthier counterparts.
SchoolGrade™ created an algorithm to disentangle these structural confounds and offer a fairer, evidence-based appraisal of institutional effectiveness. Leveraging nationwide administrative datasets, granular demographic microdata and peer-reviewed insights from the economics-of-education literature, our research team constructed a multilevel predictive model capable of estimating expected test performance with > 95 % out-of-sample accuracy. The model assimilates hundreds of covariates, ranging from census-tract migration patterns to local labor-market volatility, thereby producing a counterfactual score for every public school in the United States, including those that opt out of annual state testing.
The Impact Grade indicator is derived from the deviation between this modelled expectation and a school’s realized outcomes. Positive differentials signify institutions that consistently outperform structural predictions; negative differentials identify contexts in which students, relative to their demographic and economic peers, are not realizing their full academic potential. In this way, Impact Grade functions less as a gauge of raw attainment and more as an efficiency metric, highlighting environments where professional practice, school climate and leadership add measurable value beyond baseline advantages.
Because the framework is explicitly designed to neutralize the confounding influence of wealth, it can illuminate under-appreciated excellence in low-income districts and, conversely, draw attention to under-performing schools in high-resource communities. Policymakers, parents and researchers thus gain a clearer lens through which to evaluate programmatic interventions, allocation decisions and enrolment choices.
By situating school assessment within a robust predictive analytics paradigm, SchoolGrade™ contributes to a more equitable and intellectually honest dialogue about educational quality. Rather than celebrating privilege or penalizing disadvantage, the metric foregrounds what most stakeholders truly wish to know: how effectively is each school helping its unique student body to learn?
How to Read a SchoolGrade Page
Rankings stay inside one state. Each state sets its own tests and its own proficiency bar, so a 60% in one state is not a 60% in another. City, county and state pages rank schools against each other within the state; SchoolGrade does not rank schools or states against each other across state lines.
Every school is graded on the same basis. The grade is proficiency; the projection and the Impact Grade sit beside it so that a school serving a high-poverty community and a school in an affluent suburb can each be read on their own terms.
Neighborhood context is context, not a rating. Crime Grades from CrimeGrade.org and community economics from BestNeighborhood.org appear on school pages so families can see the whole picture. They never feed the school’s grade.
Schools cannot pay to change a grade. Grades and Impact labels are computed from public data on the same schedule for every school. Schools may display their grade with a free badge; the badge reads live from this site and changes only when the data does.
Common Questions
Where does the data come from?
State assessment results reported to the U.S. Department of Education, the National Center for Education Statistics (school directory, enrollment, staffing, finance and civil-rights data), and U.S. Census and American Community Survey microdata for the community context that feeds the projection.
How often are grades updated?
Grades refresh when a new school year of state assessment data becomes available, typically once a year. The school year the current grades reflect is shown on every badge.
What does an “N/A” grade mean?
The state did not report a usable proficiency figure for that school, most often because the school is very small, newly opened, serves grades that are not tested, or falls under a state reporting suppression rule. The projection can still be shown where the community data exists.
Can a school with a low grade have a strong Impact Grade?
Yes, and that is the point. A school whose students arrive with fewer advantages can post a modest proficiency rate and still exceed what its circumstances predict. The Impact Grade is how SchoolGrade surfaces those schools.
How do I report an error?
Use the contact form on the About page. Corrections to source data are passed upstream; corrections to a school’s name, level or location are made at the next refresh.
References
¹ Hanushek, E. A., Light, J. D., Peterson, P. E., Talpey, L. M., & Woessmann, L. (2022). Long-run trends in the US SES—Achievement gap. Education Finance and Policy, 17(4), 608-640.
Coleman, J. S., Campbell, E. Q., Hobson, C. J., McPartland, J., Mood, A. M., Weinfeld, F. D., & York, R. L. (1966). Equality of educational opportunity (OE-38001). U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Education. ERIC
Duncan, G. J., & Magnuson, K. (2011). The long reach of early childhood poverty. Pathways, Winter, 22–27. Stanford Poverty Center
Lee, V. E., & Burkam, D. T. (2002). Inequality at the starting gate: Social background differences in achievement as children begin school. Economic Policy Institute. Economic Policy Institute
Perry, L. B., & McConney, A. (2013). School socioeconomic status and student outcomes in reading and mathematics: A comparison of Australia and Canada. Australian Journal of Education, 57(2), 124–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/0004944113485836
Reardon, S. F. (2011). The widening academic achievement gap between the rich and the poor: New evidence and possible explanations. In G. J. Duncan & R. J. Murnane (Eds.), Whither opportunity? Rising inequality, schools, and children’s life chances (pp. 91–116). Russell Sage Foundation. Center for Education Policy Analysis
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Alexander, N. A., & Jang, S. T. (2020). Policy, poverty, and student achievement: An exploration of the impact of state policies. Educational Policy, 34(4), 674–704. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904818802114
Jang, H., & Reardon, S. F. (2019). States as sites of educational (in)equality: State contexts and the socioeconomic achievement gradient. AERA Open, 5(3), 1–22. EOP at Stanford
Jackson, C. K., Johnson, R. C., & Persico, C. (2016). The effects of school spending on educational and economic outcomes: Evidence from school finance reforms. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 131(1), 157–218. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjv036