JOANNE JACOBS: What’s a ‘good’ school? Parents have more choices, need more info.

“A lot of the shiny schools in nice neighborhoods with slick websites that glowed with platitudes about child-centered learning and urban farming, and posted photos of racially diverse children, and which I suspected parents loved not only for those reasons but also because other parents who talked like them and dressed like them sent their kids there, too, were, in fact, academically middling.”

Considering the demographics, schools were underperforming and, in some cases, “leaving behind critical groups of students, like students with disabilities or English Language Learners,” he writes. Hunt also discovered other schools that were doing better than their student demographics would predict.

Hunt tried sharing the information with parents on the playground. They didn’t want to hear it.

Some had “subscribed to the luxury belief that as long as your kid has heard his necessary 30 million words before he turns 3 and his mac ‘n cheese is Annie’s brand, he can caper his way through elementary school on nothing more than vibes,” Hunt writes.

“Standardized tests are not perfect, most especially the ones administered by the states,” he concludes. “They’re probably too long. They’re not as precise as they should be. They can be logistical headaches. The move to digitize them is questionable.”

But they’re the only reliable way for parents to know if their children are doing grade-level work, Hunt writes.

It’s complicated but longer term, getting parents more involved must be a good thing.