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Thalia Tringo, a real estate agent in the Boston area, faces a dilemma whenever a homebuyer asks her if the local schools are any good. This can be a dicey topic because buyers’ perceptions of schools are often closely associated with the racial makeup of their student bodies, which usually matches the racial makeup of their surrounding neighborhoods. Tringo avoids answering specific questions about schools because of professional rules designed to prevent racial discrimination in housing. So like many real estate agents, she plays it safe, telling clients to look up the information on their own, even though she is wary of what they’re likely to find.
Among the first results on a cursory Google search is usually GreatSchools, a nonprofit site that ranks public schools nationwide and feeds that information to real estate sites such as Redfin, Zillow, and Realtor.com. GreatSchools is easy to find, but its ratings correlate closely with students’ racial or economic backgrounds. “The schools that get high marks and diverse schools tend to not be the same ones,” Tringo says of the exams GreatSchools uses to produce its score. She recalls going to an eighth grade graduation for a client’s kid at Winter Hill Community Innovation School in Somerville, just outside of Boston, and marveling at the friendly atmosphere among the middle schoolers and the diversity of the graduating class. “[It] was just amazing,” she says. “But you wouldn’t get that from looking at rankings.”
Winter Hill has one of the most diverse student bodies in Somerville: Half of its students are Latino and 13 percent are Black. Yet with a rating of 4 on a scale of 1 to 10, GreatSchools deems Winter Hill “below average.” Its students’ poor test scores drag its rating down, despite evidence that they’re making as much academic progress as most students in Massachusetts. Buyers looking for homes near highly rated schools might skip right over the Winter Hill neighborhood and look closer to one of Somerville’s other schools or in another town altogether.
There’s evidence that GreatSchools’ ratings are exacerbating racial segregation, not just within school systems but in the communities around them. “What makes GreatSchools popular is partly that they’re linked to real estate sites, which is partly what makes them dangerous,” says Sean Reardon, an education professor at Stanford University who studies poverty and inequality. “They start to overtly link people’s residential choices to what seems to be a measure of school quality. While that makes lots of sense if it’s a high-quality metric of school quality, if it’s
