Color by Numbers

GreatSchools has become the go-to source for information on local schools. Yet its ratings could be making neighborhood segregation worse.

- By Daniel C. Vock

Thalia Tringo, a real estate agent in the Boston area, faces a dilemma whenever a homebuyer asks her if the local schools are any good. This can be a dicey topic because buyers’ perceptions of schools are often closely associated with the racial makeup of their student bodies, which usually matches the racial makeup of their surrounding neighborhoods. Tringo avoids answering specific questions about schools because of professional rules designed to prevent racial discrimination in housing. So like many real estate agents, she plays it safe, telling clients to look up the information on their own, even though she is wary of what they’re likely to find.

Among the first results on a cursory Google search is usually GreatSchools, a nonprofit site that ranks public schools nationwide and feeds that information to real estate sites such as Redfin, Zillow, and Realtor.com. GreatSchools is easy to find, but its ratings correlate closely with students’ racial or economic backgrounds. “The schools that get high marks and diverse schools tend to not be the same ones,” Tringo says of the exams GreatSchools uses to produce its score. She recalls going to an eighth grade graduation for a client’s kid at Winter Hill Community Innovation School in Somerville, just outside of Boston, and marveling at the friendly atmosphere among the middle schoolers and the diversity of the graduating class. “[It] was just amazing,” she says. “But you wouldn’t get that from looking at rankings.”