I have some experience with both sides of this picture. I grew up in a suburb with highly rated schools, and I'm raising my kid in a dense city with poorly rate

I have some experience with both sides of this picture. I grew up in a suburb with highly rated schools, and I'm raising my kid in a dense city with poorly rated schools. School ratings are (mostly) complete bullshit. My school left me completely unprepared for facing the real world. I literally had history teachers that taught me that the civil war wasn't about slavery. Every teacher I had taught to the test, and this was decades before NCLB. Meanwhile, my child who is in a medium rated school in a poorly rated school district is learning critical thinking skills that I didn't even know were necessary until I started flunking out of college. As a second grader, he not only can keep up with math and science and writing standards for his age group, but he can actually apply it: I'm constantly seeing him take real world problems and figure out how to use something he learned in school to solve that problem, whether by building a mental mathematical model or designing an experiment, or using a resource like a dictionary to help him understand a word he doesn't know. My world was never like that...I thought of school as an intake of knowledge that had to be memorized, not as a way of learning. I'm not putting these motivations into your mouth, but I get the feeling like school ratings are merely a subconscious correlation with whiteness, and as long as you aren't completely checked out from your child's life, you can ignore them completely.