test scores are only a small piece of the puzzle

How do you judge a school?  To start you can look at the test scores. These may come in the form of the School Progress Reports (the DOE's flawed number crunching), the more nuanced but not fool-proof Quality Reviews or the number rankings given by the national websites. The black and white reality of a simple number or letter ranking is that it predicts how well your child will be able to complete a standardized test, not the quality of their education. The scores are often clung to as a measure of quality by prospective parents, but the tests are scorned by parents whose children already attend school. Assessments need to be made and there has to some kind of accountability, but the richest learning doesn't happen within test prep and the score can be a smoke screen.

You can read reviews on insideschools, study the school's website and get individual parent comments on the list serves. You can tour the schools and stand outside at 2:45 for dismissal and eyeball the parents picking up their kids. All of these are pieces of the puzzle, but none of them will give you the the kind of information about the right school for your child except the school tour that you take with your own eyes.

If you are an informed consumer, armed with the test scores and comments by others, the tour should seal the deal or expose the school as a bad fit and be the biggest factor when deciding.  Even though many parents feel that there is safety in numbers (the most popular schools must be the "best") there are many quality programs laboring in obscurity (often with smaller class sizes). If you can tour several schools, you will start to see similarities and differences. Many of the differences will be comparing apples and oranges, an old building compared to a newer building, a variety of enrichment classes compared to a fabulous afterschool, etc.

Keep your mind open. Look for exciting classrooms instead of the highest test scores. Does what you see in the classroom make sense with the school's scores. Do they seem realistic? Is the work on the bulletin board suspiciously flawless or all the same? Remember to trust your instincts. There are no guarantees in life but it is very possible to get a wonderful public education in the NYC public schools.

looking online for a good school

There are a number of sites that show information on local schools. They often have links to real estate sites that show properties in the area.

insideschools.org is above all my favorite. It is a local non profit run by Advocates for Children. It has a tremendous reach and depth and the first thing any parent worried about schools should do is sign up for their newsletter alerts and send them a little tax deductible thank you for the incredibly good work that they do. (I am not affiliated with them, I just love them.) You can "Ask Judy" a question, browse their forum, check their calendar, and most importantly read their reviews. The data at the beginning of the review (test scores and numbers) are updated every year and any change in principal or location is added right away. Because they review every school in the city, some reviews are a couple years old, check the dates at the end of the review. Remember that all parents that comment on schools are on a mission. They either love the school or hate it and it is difficult to get an objective reading of how much the parent body as a whole feels. If you have trouble searching for the school by name, also try searching by zip and age level, one of these two ways always gets results.

schools.nyc.gov is the Dept. of Education's website. There are individual school pages here (go to find a school). You can find copies of state and city reports on each school under the "statistics" tab on their school page. I recommend browsing the menu on the homepage, often publications, calendars and procedures are listed here or downloadable as pdf files. This is a very large deep and sometimes confusing website. If you find a page that you like, bookmark it so that you can find it again.

https://nyccharterschools.org/ is a searchable NYC database of charter schools

greatschools.org is a national site where you can search by city, or address, district etc. The search tool is clumsy at best and it is difficult to browse. The comparison of local schools also gives a weirdly haphazard and incomplete mix and sometimes elementary, middle and high schools are incorporated in the same list. For a national site that doesn't really address the complexities of the NYC school system, it is the best by far. They give a number ranking to the schools that is mostly based on test scores which can be misleading and are only a small indication of school's quality. There are parent comments and lots of general articles.

schooldigger.com searches by zip or address or city and gives a clear map of public elementary choices, but their ranking system is out of date and based on scores. They have very clear links to real estate if you are looking for that.

All the others are just lists of addresses.

Lice Wars

How to deal with head lice.
My girls started getting lice in kindergarten. Dress up, coats in a pile, sleepovers sharing beds and baths, and the ultimate culprit - Picture Day, all contributed to the problem. Like clockwork, every year in Oct. about a week after Picture Day we would get a visit from our newest pets. I truly believe that they weren't sharing combs, and I do not blame the school at all. The lice were just loosened up and getting around. For the most part it ended in third grade. Girls had shorter hair, and they weren't rolling around and rubbing heads together as much, maybe also they were just growing up and not playing so much dress-up anymore.

I am relatively bug squeamish and I am not at all afraid of head lice. I see them as cunning adversaries. In all of the years that we were plagued, my husband and I never got them and I was so used to them in the end that I would do the lice check on my own bed. The girls were also never re-infested from our house, it always came in direct relation to a playdate with a friend who had them or picture day. They really seem to go from head to head.

The nits are light colored on my ash blond children's hair, near the scalp. The lice stay at the scalp and don't venture far down the strands. I have heard they like secluded places like behind the ears and low at the neck, but ours always brazenly stayed within easy sight right on the top of the head, laughing at me. Full grown, the lice are light brown and flat almond shape, like a flax seed, and they are fast. You will just see them out of the corner of your eye in a lice check and they will be gone, in an instant. I have spent hours chasing one around my darling's scalp, until she developed a relationship, "don't get 'Biggie', he's my friend"?! Lice checks are when I first discovered that I needed bifocals. The "lice call" from school was always the worst. I only had to say "Lice" to my boss and she handed me my car keys and said that she would see me in the morning. Sometimes it was a false alarm, some dandruff or stray glitter glue, which is infuriating. I have to say that if you suspect that your child has lice you need to have full disclosure to family and friends. Do not send them to the party, or the sleepover - you will lose friends and nothing spoils a reputation faster than being lazy with your disclosure. I won't tell you about the time I had the girls' sweet friend sitting on the hard wood floor at 10pm with our carpets rolled up and her head swathed in olive oil and saran wrap because she had such a bad infestation that I could see them from across the room. I was alone and couldn't get to the drug store and her parents weren't answering their phone.

Let me start off by saying that after reading everything written on them and trying every remedy from the hippie dippy to DDT, I now have THE tried and true, easy, surefire solution. This method removes all lice and nits and it is kind of fun to do. You need a really good lice comb. Check out a metal lice comb at www.colonialmedical.com/product.php?productid=18574 (search for "metal lice comb" I'm not too good with my links yet) I haven't seen this one in person, but I think it is the right model. It needs to have round tongs that have no air between them. Do not use the lice combs you get free in the Rid box, they are useless. You need a roll of paper towels and a bottle of Pantene conditioner.

First squeeze a ton of conditioner all over your child's barely damp head. Rub it around so no lice can escape the goo. Then start combing. Make sure that you are combing from the scalp and do it over and over. You will be combing out great gobs of conditioner and wiping on the paper towels. The Pantene is good because it is white and you see everything that is coming off the hair. It also has enough body that no lice can get away. You will see the nits and the occasional louse, you will also see sand, glitter, pieces of old sandwich and stickers (a child's life spread out before you on that paper towel). Keep doing it until you have a full, thorough pass of the head that comes up with nothing. Do it again the next day and if you come up liceless you are home free. It is as easy as that. Last summer on vacation I had 4 children with lice and in a little over an hour they were free and their hair smelled great! Then take all bedding and towels, wash and dry them hot. If you can wash and dry the stuffies that is great, if things can't be washed put them in a sealed garbage bag for two weeks to do the trick.

These are things that I tried; olive oil and baking soda, tea tree oil and tea tree oil shampoo, all of the over the counter treatments, a heavy duty prescription treatment, vigilant lice checks that took HOURS. The Pantene and thorough combing really, really works.

Courage, lice are nothing like bed bugs, they can be dealt with easily enough, or you can call the wonderful Lice Lady.