Last Dec I was pretty close to buy Glenmoor Fremont property, Missed it. Now I wanted to focus on this place and suddenly I see the school is rated as 6/10 if I remember correctly it uses to be 9/10 last winter and is one of the old schools.
I am not a guy who is picky about rating/points of schools but so much fall, am I missing something or is it a scam from great school and real estate agencies … locals let us know how is that school. There are awesome properties in that area. There is another ranking agency niche … they still think it is better school better then newer schools like Arden wood
GreatSchools Summary Rating
GreatSchools is a national nonprofit organization. Our new Summary Rating provides a multi-measured reflection of school quality based on the ratings components you see here. Learn more about GreatSchools Ratings.
Rating components Weight Rating/flag
Test Scores 57% 8/10
Equity Overview 34% 3/10
Academic Progress 9% 6/10
Last updated: Nov 09, 2017
If you put your mouse on the score number at above website, then you would see summary I copied above.
Apparently, their test score rating is 8/10. This is traditional type of rating.
The main reason score becomes 6/10 is because of Equity Overview.
According to great school website, it is defined as follows. The Equity Overview Rating looks at how well this school is serving the needs of its disadvantaged students relative to all its students, compared to other schools in the state, based on test scores provided from the state Department of Education.
Many schools were downgraded last year due to “Equity Overview Rating”. All Cupertino schools (except high school since they applied different weight for high school) were downgraded to 9/10 and Turman/Jordan middle and many elementary school in PA (including Walter Hays in Old PA) were downgraded to 8/10 because of this factor. I don’t see 10/10 rating for any elementary/middle school in greatschool rating any more.
Thus, if I were you, I would visit greatschool.org website and just refer to test_score section.
Especially, I would look at proficient% and compare it with other schools instead of relying on their grade for test_score section(their grade is inflated in my opinion).
Glenmoor elementary shows “57%(math)/59%(English) proficient%”.
For comparison, Faria elementary in Cupertino shows 96%(math)/93%(English) proficient%.
Almond elementary in Los Altos shows 78%(math)/81%(English) proficient%.
As you said, school rating is just one factor.
However, that one factor should be straightforward enough for anyone to understand easily.
In that sense, I don’t like greatschool’s complicated new metric.
Thus, I want to see the most direct and straightforward raw data instead of mixture of little bit of this and little bit of that. Then, I can use it as one of many parameters in my decision making process.
Unfortunately, greatschool wants to influence people’s decision with their own viewpoint.
I do think that GreatSchools new methodology will influence neighborhood prices offering some great deals and some lousy ones because majority of buyers (esp those with kids but with plans in the future) aren’t going to do any deep dive.
