U.S. News & World Report

Parents, teachers, principals, central office decision-makers, taxpayers – everyone wants a balanced, accessible way of measuring the quality of a school. At this point, almost everyone acknowledges that standardized test scores paint a pretty poor, or at least exceedingly limited, picture of whether a school is thriving. And in this era of ubiquitous rankings and lists – of Consumer Reports and Yelp and Amazon reviews – we're conditioned to having a lot of information at our fingertips, designed to help us make good decisions. Why, then, is it so hard to find good information on schools, or to even decide what good information would look like?

Take, for example, New York City's budding effort to redesign their "School Quality Snapshots," which currently reduce a school to a single letter grade, 85 percent of which is based on test scores. The proposed redesign takes a dramatically different approach, making student achievement one component among many. That broader system now asks if the school has ambitious instruction, strong leadership, engaged parents and a culture and climate that is safe, collaborative and trusting...