Am I Overthinking This? How to Choose a School

I have spent more hours than I want to admit trying to figure out how to choose a school for my daughter.

I've read the Arkansas school report cards. I've read more parent Facebook threads than I can count. I've walked the halls on tours and nodded along like I knew what I was looking at. We even built a whole website to help other families get through this exact process.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I stopped and asked myself: am I just overthinking this? Is there really no way to know?

Because every time I try to decide what matters most, I land somewhere different. Should it be test scores? Community? Diversity? What does the data say kids actually get out of school, not the brochure, not the person giving the tour?

And then I'm standing in a hallway and I realize the thing I'm actually looking at is safety. Who's at the front door. Whether the kids seem okay. How the adults talk to them when they think nobody's watching. I don't know how to put a number on that.

So I did what I always do. I went looking for the research. Here's what I found, and honestly, some of it made me feel a lot better.

Test scores vs. growth scores: what do they actually tell you?

Short version: less than I thought, unless you look at the right number.

A school's average test scores mostly tell you about the kids who walk in the door. Stanford researcher Sean Reardon looked at scores from millions of kids in about 11,000 districts. He found that third-grade scores mostly reflect the learning opportunities kids had before school, and those track closely with family income. But how fast kids grew from third to eighth grade was a totally different picture. Plenty of lower-income districts had kids learning faster than wealthier ones.

Arkansas shows the same thing. When the University of Arkansas Office for Education Policy plotted 2025 results against the share of kids on free or reduced lunch, proficiency tracked poverty closely. Growth barely did. Their point was basically that growth reflects the teaching, not the kids.

And here's the part that stung a little. A study of more than 250,000 New York City school applicants found that parents mostly pick schools with high-achieving classmates. Once researchers accounted for who was enrolled, parents' choices had no real connection to how much the school actually helped kids. We weren't avoiding bad teaching. We were avoiding schools that enrolled kids who were behind.

Honestly? I felt a little called out.

So here's what I'm doing differently. Arkansas changed how it calculates school letter grades, and for K-8 the grade now comes from nine equally weighted measures. Three are about proficiency. Six are about growth, including growth for the kids who started out furthest behind. So when I look up a school now, the number I actually want is growth. That's the closest thing we have to "what does this school add?"

What kids actually get out of school (hint: it's not test scores)

This is the part I didn't expect. The research keeps pointing at the stuff that doesn't show up on a test.

The study that got me was about kindergarten. In Tennessee in the 1980s, about 11,500 kids were randomly assigned to classrooms, and researchers later followed them into adulthood. Kids who landed in a stronger kindergarten class earned more as adults and were more likely to go to college.

Here's the weird part. Their test score advantage had basically faded by junior high. What stuck around was focus, self-discipline, and behavior, as rated by their eighth-grade teachers.

Economist Kirabo Jackson found the same pattern with older kids. The teachers who improved attendance, behavior, and grades weren't always the ones who raised test scores. And those non-test effects predicted graduation and college-going better than test scores did.

Later, he and his colleagues looked at Chicago high schools. Schools that helped kids feel socially okay and work hard had fewer school-based arrests and more kids graduating and going to college, on top of anything they did for scores. A school in the top 5% for test scores might only be around the 75th percentile for building those skills.

So if you're asking what the data says matters most? It's habits, and how a kid feels at school. Showing up. Trying hard. Getting along with people. Bouncing back.

One more thing that stuck with me: in that kindergarten study, kids were assigned to different classrooms inside the same schools. So which room she lands in matters, not just which building.

Do school diversity and community matter?

The biggest study I found on this wasn't really about schools. It was about friendships.

Raj Chetty and his team looked at billions of Facebook friendships. They found that friendships across income lines were the strongest predictor of whether kids from lower-income families moved up, stronger than educational outcomes, inequality, or family structure. They call it economic connectedness. I call it "who your kid ends up friends with."

But here's the catch. Just putting different kids in the same building isn't enough. Their follow-up study found that more mixing only turned into more friendships in schools where kids actually befriend each other across those lines. They even published the numbers for every high school and zip code at socialcapital.org, so you can look up where your kid would eventually land.

On diversity more broadly, a Teachers College research review for the Century Foundation, a group that advocates for integration, found the benefits of diverse schools flow to every group of kids. That included smaller achievement gaps, higher SAT scores, and lower dropout rates than in segregated, high-poverty schools. The researchers were also clear those benefits aren't automatic. It depends on how the school actually runs things.

So for me, diversity isn't a box to check. The real question is: do the kids here actually mix? Who's sitting together at lunch? Who's playing together at recess? That I can actually watch for on a tour.

School safety: how do you even put a number on that?

This is the one I keep coming back to. When I walk into a school, I'm not thinking about growth scores. I'm thinking: is she going to be safe here?

It turns out that's not just mom anxiety. It shows up in the data. In a study of more than 340,000 New York City middle schoolers, 15% of kids who felt unsafe said they stayed home most or all of the time, compared with 3% of kids who felt safe. Kids who don't feel safe don't come to school.

But the stuff I notice first isn't always what makes kids feel safe. One national study found that metal detectors and more visible security went along with kids feeling less safe, not more. Another found that, on average, cameras inside the building lowered how safe students felt, while a security officer raised it. I'm not saying locked doors don't matter. They do. They're just not the whole picture.

What kids actually describe is people. When Philadelphia's school district asked students what safety meant to them, kids felt least safe in places without enough adults around, and they connected safety to staffing, cleanliness, and the overall feel of the school.

So here's how I'm trying to put numbers on it:

• Chronic absenteeism. That's the share of kids missing 10% or more of the school year. In Arkansas it runs highest in early elementary and high school. It's not a perfect safety measure, since kids miss school for lots of reasons, but it's a real number. OEP posts district rates, and you can ask a school for its own.
• Discipline numbers, with a grain of salt. Arkansas limits suspensions and expulsions in K-5, and a University of Arkansas report found some elementary schools reported no discipline data at all for a couple of years. A low number at an elementary school might not mean much.
• Climate surveys. Ask if the school surveys students and families about safety and belonging, and whether they'll share the results.
• What I can see with my own eyes. Who's watching the bathrooms, hallways, and recess? How do adults talk to kids? Could a kid name a grown-up they'd go to if something was wrong?

So, am I overthinking school choice?

Kind of. Yes and no.

There's no single number that tells you the right school. Nobody can promise you that. But that doesn't mean there's no way to know anything. It just means I was staring at the wrong numbers.

Here's what I'm actually basing it on now:

1. Growth, not proficiency. How much do kids learn once they're there?
2. Whether kids show up. Attendance is the closest thing I've found to a safety score.
3. Whether kids mix, and whether the adults know them. That's where the habits and friendships come from.
4. How it feels when I walk in. My gut on a tour is basically a one-person climate survey. It's not nothing.

And because which classroom she lands in matters too, picking the school isn't the end of it. It's the start.

How to choose a school: my 7-step plan

Okay, but how do you actually make the call? Here's my plan:

1. Start with the dealbreakers. Commute, before- and after-care, cost, anything my kid specifically needs. That narrows the list fast, and a school that's hard to get to makes it harder to show up every day.
2. Shortlist by growth. I look up growth scores, not proficiency, and cut the schools where kids aren't growing.
3. Check attendance. A high chronic absenteeism rate is a yellow flag I want to ask about.
4. Tour with a checklist, not a vibe. Enough adults in the hallways, bathrooms, and recess? How do they talk to kids? Do kids from different backgrounds actually play together?
5. Talk to current parents. What would they change? Does their kid like going? You won't hear that on a tour.
6. Apply to more than one. Between lotteries and waitpools, I want a backup so a deadline doesn't make the decision for me.
7. Pick from the good-enough pile, and stop. If two or three schools pass all of this, the differences between them are probably smaller than they feel. I'll choose the one that fits our life best.

If you're in the middle of this too, you're not crazy and you're not alone. That's honestly why we built eduScout, to help Central Arkansas families sort through all of this. Nobody should have to figure it out by themselves.