About the School Guide

The Seattle Times School Guide is the most comprehensive report available on public and private elementary schools, middle schools, junior highs and high schools in the greater Seattle area.

Inside, you'll find detailed profiles of 693 schools — everything from their test scores and class sizes to what schools say they're doing to improve student achievement.

Use the Guide to help you select a school, or to see how your school stacks up against others in the area. It also offers a good overview of education in our region, showing what philosophies and programs are taking hold in many schools and districts, the extent of parent involvement, how computers are being used and more.

The data in the School Guide works better as a weather report than a report card. If a school turns up at the top of a number of criteria, the prevailing winds may well be blowing in the right direction. If a school consistently shows up at the bottom, it's worth asking why — and looking further to see what might be behind it.

If test scores are low, is it because the school has a high number of students who speak English as a second language? Did the school include special-education students in testing, while other schools excluded them?

Test scores say more about who goes to a school than how the school is doing. A school full of students from well-off families will almost certainly have higher test scores than a school with large numbers of students living in poverty — no matter how good that second school might be.

What's inside: The School Guide covers all public and private schools with an enrollment of about 50 students and above in King County, most of Snohomish County, and on Bainbridge and Vashon islands. You'll find profiles and data for 549 public schools and 144 private schools.

How the Guide is compiled: The Seattle Times publishes one edition of the School Guide — with elementary and kindergarten-to-eighth-grade schools, plus secondary schools. Information is collected from a variety of sources — primarily from the schools themselves. Each spring, we ask schools to fill out a survey about school highlights, parent involvement and more. We also collect data from the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, including each school's test scores. And we do some of our own analysis of those numbers in an effort to identify schools that are doing a good job but don't usually get recognized for it.

The majority of the Guide is made up of individual school profiles — program highlights, initiatives to boost academic achievement, before- and after-school programs — provided by the school, most often by the principal.

Reading a school profile can be a bit like decoding a secret language. Some emphasize basic skills, while others may highlight community service or child-directed projects or safety. A school that emphasizes its test scores might prompt a parent to ask about how the school balances test preparation with other academic needs.

While the Guide is a powerful starting point, we caution you not to use the information here as the last word on any school.

As you look at the data and profile information, we hope you'll do what we've tried to do and what experts recommend: Don't look solely at test scores, or at any single measure, when sizing up a school. Gather as much information as you can, because the more you look at, the fuller picture you get.

If something doesn't make sense, ask the school about it. If you see something that needs fixing — or if you see something other schools are doing that you'd like to see at your school — offer to help.

Because if there's a single thing educators agree on, it's that the biggest factor in student success is the degree to which parents care about, and participate in, their children's education.

We hope the School Guide will help you do just that.