When Brian McDonald moved from Texas to California to take the job as chief academic officer of Pasadena Unified School District (PUSD), he planned to buy a house in the neighborhood. His realtor, however, had another idea: Buy a more expensive home in a nearby district so that he could actually send his kids to public school.
McDonald was stunned. Despite knowing that he would be leading Pasadena's schools, the realtor still encouraged him to enroll his children elsewhere.
"It's a funny story," says Patrick Conyers, executive director of the Pasadena Educational Foundation, a nonprofit that supports the district. "The realtor couldn't even break out of [his] standard talking points when speaking to someone coming to work at PUSD in a leadership position."
Operating with either incorrect or outdated information, "realtors were helping to perpetuate a perception gap that exists in our community," explains Conyers, "that the schools are of lower quality than they actually are."
Pasadena is one of many districts turning their attention to the influence of real estate agents, "who are a first point of contact with a lot of people coming into the community." The National Association of Realtors advises agents not to share their personal opinions about communities or schools (doing so could be a violation of the Fair Housing Act), but instead to provide objective information, pointing clients to school or community websites or helping set up school visits.
To facilitate accurate information sharing, Pasadena's foundation launched the Realtor Initiative three years ago with the support of McDonald, now the district's superintendent. The goal of the program is to not only set the record straight about Pasadena's schools, but also invite agents to tour and volunteer in buildings so that they can observe the improvements firsthand.
Districts seeking to change community narratives about school quality are doing so with the expectation that seeing is believing.
Ratings and the Rumor Mill
It is "not necessarily a cultural practice in this country [to] learn about schools by actually spending time in them," says Jack Schneider, assistant professor of education at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. "Instead, we tend to learn about schools via word of mouth or by newspaper, magazine, and online ratings."
Schneider, author of Beyond Test Scores: A Better Way to Measure School Quality (Harvard University Press, 2017), says ratings on real estate websites—fueled by third-party providers like GreatSchools, Niche, and SchoolDigger—can paint a limited picture of school quality. They might indicate that students at a school are good at "crushing tests," he says, but they often fail to account for "just about everything you care about when you sit down at your parent-teacher conference." For example, he asks, how safe do students feel? How engaged are they in learning? How strong are their relationships with teachers and peers? How healthy are they socially, emotionally, and physically? How are they developing as artists and citizens?
David Cohen, an author and English teacher at Palo Alto High School, has visited elementary schools all over California as part of a book project and observed phenomenal schools and teachers. "There are so many ways to give thought to what it means to be outstanding," he argues, that these strengths cannot be captured on a 10-point scale or with a letter grade.
The "oversimplification" of data in online ratings and reviews is a symptom of a broader problem in education accountability, says Cohen. In his view, California has started to move in the right direction by scrapping its Academic Performance Index, which used standardized test scores to measure schools on a 1,000-point scale. The state's new dashboard accountability system, he explains, gives parents a more robust set of data to navigate and includes color-coded performance levels for each indicator, rather than a final score.
"If you try to get it down to a single rating or ranking, then that's poor work," Cohen believes. Even when multiple measures of accountability are factored in, distilling them into a score or letter grade means you will lose information and "there will be winners and losers."
Schneider offers this analogy: "If you mix all of the different colors together, the result is something that totally distorts the component parts of it."
"The first thing is to recognize that there is no single accurate picture [of school quality]," says Cohen. "Depending on who you ask, I'm an awful teacher or a great teacher. Misunderstandings, bad feelings, and anecdotal evidence take on a life of [their] own." That is why it is imperative to "go for a variety of sources and embrace the ambiguity."
An Avenue to Engage
Samantha Olivieri, chief strategy officer of GreatSchools, says its summary ratings (which expanded in November 2017 to include equity, academic progress, and advanced coursework data) are designed to initiate conversations about school quality.
The overall goal, she says, "is to encourage parents to take the next step in understanding what's going on at their child's school and to get involved in improvement efforts."
Olivieri agrees that "there's more to a school than a score." When weighing options, she recommends parents "go deeper, look at these different factors, and think about how well a school might fit their particular needs."
For some prospective parents, however, a Google search showing low ratings for a school can deter them from enrolling in the first place. "If it looks like a school is struggling, you're not inclined to dig deeper," says Schneider. "It's a shifting mindset where the school just falls off your radar."
We had to "educate realtors about what's true and not true about some of those figures you can easily see online," says Conyers of the Pasadena Educational Foundation. He notes that the data on these ratings sites might lag. "Some schools have gone through such a transformation that wouldn't be reflected in those numbers."
The stakes are high for realtors, too: According to a 2013 study from real estate website Redfin, an actual price tag can be assigned to school quality: $50 per square foot. That's the premium buyers pay for homes in top-rated school districts compared with homes in "average" districts.
In its work to deepen realtors’ understanding of schools, the Pasadena Educational Foundation serves as a courier, passing along information from district administrators to realty offices. Each office has an assigned liaison who then communicates that news to fellow agents. It's a well-oiled machine, Conyers notes.
But realtors aren't just passively absorbing this information: In addition to supplying agents with fact sheets about individual schools and monthly newsletters that cover important news and events in the Pasadena district, "we created an avenue for them to engage in our schools," says Hilda Ramirez Horvath, PUSD's communications coordinator.
Realtors can take tours of the city's schools, participate in "principal for a day" events, or attend monthly lunches with the superintendent. Many of them volunteer in schools on a regular basis, says Horvath, or take part in coordinated events like an annual book drive for 2nd graders.
Read Across America Day, which celebrates Dr. Seuss's birthday in March, has morphed into Realtors Read Across Pasadena. The district invites local realtors to spend the day in classrooms reading aloud to students.
Del Lile, a realtor with Coldwell Banker, read to 4th graders at his alma mater, Cleveland Elementary School, where he was impressed by the flexible seating arrangements and students’ presentation skills (when they shared comics they designed). "It was a positive experience," Lile says, "and I think it was fun for the kids, too."
As part of the Realtor Initiative, Lile has toured six or seven schools in PUSD, learning about programs he "had no idea existed," like dual-language immersion (offered in French, Spanish, and Mandarin across multiple schools). After observing "all this great learning happening," Lile says he is much more likely to advise his clients to consider the district.
Horvath says the efforts are paying off: "We are a declining enrollment school district, like most of California, but the rate of decline has slowed," she notes. "Before, where PUSD might not have been on the list of possible schools [to consider], now people are turning to us. They are talking about PUSD in new ways."
If These Walls Could Talk
Like McDonald, Jeff Ramnytz, superintendent of Barberton City Schools just outside Akron, Ohio, was fed up with realtors steering families (including those of district employees) to nearby districts. As the principal of Barberton High School for nine years, Ramnytz invited prospective parents on tours and asked if their child wanted to shadow a student for a day. When he could get families through the doors, he says, 85 percent would end up enrolling.
"I started thinking, 'Why don't I bring realtors in so [that] I can better explain our district and what we have to offer?' "
So Ramnytz sent nearly 1,000 invitations to agents in the region, inviting them to tour Barberton High. On the day of the event in late October, 22 realtors showed up to visit classrooms and hear presentations from students and teachers about innovations like the STEM lab, early college and career education, 1:1 technology, and their national designation as a Google for Education District.
During their conversation over lunch, Ramnytz addressed the "elephant in the room," acknowledging that most school systems in Ohio, including Barberton, had experienced a dip in scores when the state testing system changed. While explaining the context to the realtors, he emphasized that the district didn't see it as an excuse. "We work every day to get better, and we do get better," he said.
Still, "when you're a parent and you're looking for a place to send your kids, you see scores," admits Ramnytz. "And if you don't understand what those scores mean, it can deter you from coming to a place like this."
"That's why, to me, it's so important to get people inside of our walls to see what we have to offer. The scores don't define everything we do and provide."
A Place at the Table
In South Philadelphia, parents have been mobilizing to change the reputation of local schools, starting from "ground zero after 15 years of chronic underfunding and drops in enrollment," says local activist and parent Mollie Michel.
After moving from Brooklyn to Philadelphia four years ago, Michel enrolled her older daughter in kindergarten at the neighborhood school. But as she prepared to follow suit with her second daughter, she started hearing more neighbors and news outlets perpetuating the notion that the city's schools were unacceptable.
"The idea of our schools not being safe or not good enough was so pervasive," Michel recalls. After visiting several elementary schools nearby, seeing the incredible programming and meeting the supportive staff, she connected with other parents in the area to give realtors the same experience.
Most agents, Michel learned, had never stepped foot in the city's public schools, "so they couldn't articulate to any family what the landscape was, what the student body was like, or what the teachers were like. They had no information."
In January 2016, Michel led 40 realtors on a tour of five elementary schools in South Philly. The event, which was set up as a fundraiser (real estate offices paid a sponsorship fee to get six seats on the bus), pulled in $6,000 for the participating schools. The group travelled on a yellow school bus between each site, where principals escorted them around classrooms, art and music rooms, auditoriums, computer labs, and even a piano lab.
"We talked about the activities, student engagement, community partners, after-school programs—all of the things that tell the real story of a school," says Michel. Realtors also received fact sheets to share with clients.
"The most important thing was for them to see and understand that these are warm, loving places where children are learning," Michel says, "safe, inclusive places. When you walk into any of these schools, murals and artwork [are] up everywhere; they look exactly like an elementary school should look."
Grassroots efforts such as these, she adds, are bringing Philadelphia's traditional public schools back into the conversation as a viable option for families alongside parochial and charter schools.
Tell Your Story
Because they have not "historically had to engage in messaging and marketing," public schools are "behind the eight ball" in self-promotion, says Schneider. He recommends updating school websites to post more resonant material—such as evidence of student learning, messages from parents or graduates, or videos of student performances—and to make it easier for realtors or prospective homebuyers to contact staff and parents who might be willing to answer questions.
"Lots of people are tapping into local networks before they move or choose a school," he says. By getting in front of these conversations, schools can correct any inaccurate perceptions that may be lingering.
GreatSchools allows administrators to "claim" their school's profile and add information about curricular offerings, the daily schedule, and sports and clubs (see the profile of Renaissance High School in Detroit, Michigan, as an example). The site also has a space to add open text and "provide qualitative information about what makes your school special," says Olivieri. "It's akin to filling out your LinkedIn profile."
Ramnytz says Barberton has become savvier at promoting the system through its website and on Facebook and Twitter. But bringing realtors into the fold was a crucial step in changing hearts and minds. He plans to make the tour an annual event.
"I do think superintendents and principals have a responsibility to change those perceptions," concludes Ramnytz. "If we don't tell our story, somebody else is going to."
