GreatSchools and Innovate Public Schools Launch New, Bilingual School Quality Website for Bay Area Parents during National School Choice Week

Visit the new site:
www.greatschools.org/bayarea

San Francisco Bay Area, CA, January 25, 2016 — GreatSchools, a national nonprofit helping parents guide their kids to successful futures, and Innovate Public Schools, which works with parents to improve education in their communities, today launched the new GreatSchools Bay Area website.

“Our goal is to better engage traditionally underserved Bay Area families in finding and demanding high-quality schools for their children and their communities,” said Matt Hammer, Founder and CEO of Innovate Public Schools. “Through this partnership, we’re putting powerful, easy-to-understand data in the hands of more parents and connecting them to opportunities to get involved to not only support their own child, but to improve schools across their community.”

Throughout the Bay Area, too many low-income students, English Learners, Latino and African-American students are being left behind, unprepared for success in college and beyond.  But there are also shining examples of schools that excel in preparing the Bay Area’s young people for success in college and beyond.

“When parents have accurate information about schools in their neighborhood that is relevant to their child, they can make better decisions,” said Bill Jackson, CEO of GreatSchools.  “Now, all parents will have more information to assess local schools, especially schools supporting traditionally underserved groups.”

Thanks to this partnership, for the first time ever, the entire GreatSchools website is available in Spanish nationwide, making school data and information accessible to millions more families. The partnership also includes rolling out new data on underserved students across the site, as well as spotlights to compare schools across a community.

This new, mobile-friendly site includes school ratings based on academic performance, math and English language arts proficiency rates and college readiness measures for different groups of students.  It also features Community Spotlight pages where parents can explore and compare how well local schools are preparing different subgroups of children in San Francisco, Redwood City, San Jose and East Palo Alto.

The new tools and features include:

• Low-income students test score: Learn how low-income students perform and how it compares statewide to schools that serve a similar student body
• Student Group Comparison: See how a school is doing for diverse groups of students
• Nearby school options: See which high-quality school options are nearby in pop-up at the bottom of every school profile
• Community Spotlights: Compare schools across the Bay Area, as well as spotlights specific to San Francisco, Redwood City, San Jose, Oakland and East Palo Alto
• Take action: Learn ways to connect and take action to improve education in the Bay Area

Visit the new site:
www.greatschools.org/bayarea

About GreatSchools
Founded in 1998, GreatSchools is a national, nonpartisan nonprofit helping millions of parents find high-quality schools, support great learning, and guide their kids to great futures. GreatSchools offers thousands of articles, videos, and worksheets to help parents support their children’s learning. Last year, GreatSchools had more than 56 million unique visitors, including more than half of all U.S. families with school-age children. Headquartered in Oakland, California, GreatSchools partners with cities and states across the country to promote access to school quality data to families, particularly those in high need. Through GreatKids initiatives, GreatSchools promotes teacher-parent collaboration and supports parenting for education success.

About Innovate Public Schools
Innovate Public Schools is a nonprofit organization focused on ensuring that all Bay Area students, including low-income students and students of color, receive an excellent education. We’re building a movement of families, educators, and business and elected leaders who together will make this vision a reality. We build the capacity of parents and educators to innovate and act together to create world-class public schools, and we publish easy-to-understand school quality data and research that highlights both problems and solutions.

CONTACT:

Carrie Goux
774-563-0295
cgoux@greatschools.org

Sierra Jenkins
310-909-6331
sjenkins@innovateschools.org

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