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Show HN: Find the best public schools in California

8 points by kpommerenke 13y ago

kpommerenke 13y ago
I built this website since I found it difficult to compare public schools based on their test results, since schools have vastly different student populations skewing test results one way or another. By isolating different populations, such as native English speakers vs. others, or students of parents with or without a college education, you can find more relevant information for your situation. Please let me know what you think about the website.
jason_slack 13y ago
The Search button doesn't seem to work. I select my criteria and click Search and I see the spinning progress indicator but it never finishes.
- kpommerenke 13y ago
  The database is getting lots of hits right now, after I posted to Hacker News. There are 5 million rows in the database, so any lookup takes a while, in spite of indexing.
kk3 13y ago
This is a great idea. I can imagine lots of parents finding this site through Google and making good use of it. Some SEO work may be worth it to make this easier for people to find. The one page dynamic nature might deter this but some simple workarounds would fix that. Thought I'd note, however, that when I changed the district to Los Angeles and hit See Results. It remained in an endless loading screen and would not return results.
- kpommerenke 13y ago
  Thanks for the ideas. Sorry for the slow site response: the database is currently getting hit pretty hard.
ahulak 13y ago
We've done a similar thing with data over at FindTheBest, except we aggregated it with the rest of the US http://public-schools.findthebest.com http://public-schools.findthebest.com Same idea, although a bit more mature in dev
- kpommerenke 13y ago
  Nice looking website, but where are the standardized testing data?
  - ahulak 13y ago
    Looks like we have them in a separate part of the site (http://ca-high-school-ratings.findthebest.com/ http://ca-high-school-ratings.findthebest.com/) I'll be the first to admit we should have these joined into one another.. I'll have to bug that PM about it

8 points by kpommerenke 13y ago

I built this website since I found it difficult to compare public schools based on their test results, since schools have vastly different student populations skewing test results one way or another. By isolating different populations, such as native English speakers vs. others, or students of parents with or without a college education, you can find more relevant information for your situation. Please let me know what you think about the website.

jason_slack 13y ago

The Search button doesn't seem to work. I select my criteria and click Search and I see the spinning progress indicator but it never finishes.

kpommerenke 13y ago
The database is getting lots of hits right now, after I posted to Hacker News. There are 5 million rows in the database, so any lookup takes a while, in spite of indexing.

kk3 13y ago

This is a great idea. I can imagine lots of parents finding this site through Google and making good use of it. Some SEO work may be worth it to make this easier for people to find. The one page dynamic nature might deter this but some simple workarounds would fix that. Thought I'd note, however, that when I changed the district to Los Angeles and hit See Results. It remained in an endless loading screen and would not return results.

kpommerenke 13y ago
Thanks for the ideas. Sorry for the slow site response: the database is currently getting hit pretty hard.

ahulak 13y ago

We've done a similar thing with data over at FindTheBest, except we aggregated it with the rest of the US http://public-schools.findthebest.com http://public-schools.findthebest.com Same idea, although a bit more mature in dev

kpommerenke 13y ago
Nice looking website, but where are the standardized testing data?
- ahulak 13y ago
  Looks like we have them in a separate part of the site (http://ca-high-school-ratings.findthebest.com/ http://ca-high-school-ratings.findthebest.com/) I'll be the first to admit we should have these joined into one another.. I'll have to bug that PM about it