How Education Stacks Up

Every successful business – from the neighborhood hardware store to the insurance company to the global technology giant – relies on detailed, accessible, comprehensive and real-time data to make decisions, allocate resources and assess results and value. Before education reform revved up over the last decade, few companies, policymakers or educators could compare student and school performance from town to town, let alone across state lines, or from year to year.

Education measurement has improved drastically. More and more states and nonprofit education improvement partners collect, report and act on annual performance data. In this section, you can get links to key international and national education performance data and the best Web sites in the country that offer state-, district- and school-level performance data. We also provide an overview of SchoolDataDirect.org, an innovative and comprehensive site that helps you search for schools by zip code, school district or state and compare spending and results.