Because the reviewers are self-selecting, however, their comments may not accurately reflect a school's environment or qualities and must be taken with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, the reviews often provide useful anecdotal data and are worth evaluating with a critical eye.
As an example, I've selected a review on the Great Schools site for a school my son attended over the course of four years. The more reviews a school has, the wider range of opinions you'll see, and at present this school has 28 reviews—a fairly large number. Here is the most recent, written by a parent in January 2009:
Turtle Rock used to be the finest elementary school in Irvine with their old principal and staff. Unfortunately, the school has been going downhill ever since Sharon Adele retired, and was replaced with ChrisAnn Shane, who closed off the campus to parents and got rid of all the fundraisers (they needed to put ads on the front of the school directories to pay for printing). The APAAS program, especially 6th Grade, went downhill after the four original teachers retired. APAAS used to be based on a higher quality of work and thinking skills. Now it just increases the workload on students, and doesn't prepare them well for later years of school.
This review is particularly useful because it offers the perspective of time and provides specific examples. It also brings up an important issue: the principal's leadership. In this case, the review mentions a principal who retired and her successor.
Unfortunately, reviews don't typically provide context (nor are they obligated to), so the information readers can glean from them is limited. Here, the review doesn't give dates, which would have put the principal succession into a frame of reference. Telling us that the former principal retired in 2004—five years ago—and that her successor was transferred to another school in 2008 would have been helpful. We could have learned that the successor's tenure of four years was long enough to have had what appear to be major negative effects on the school. More important, though, because the review doesn't mention this principal's recent departure, readers will mistakenly assume she is still there and that her alleged poor leadership is a current issue.
The review also mentions parent access and school fundraising problems. Aside from pointing to financial difficulties, which are not unique to this particular school, this comment suggests problems with the school's community. Closing off the campus to parents means they can't mingle with each other as easily, and if they don't work together on fundraising, their opportunities for building community are even more limited.
Finally, the review criticizes the Irvine Unified School District's (IUSD's) APAAS (Alternative Program for Academically Accelerated Students) program, which reportedly went downhill after the original teachers retired. Readers may not know what the acronym APAAS stands for or that the original teachers departed years ago, meaning the current situation has been in effect for a long time.
Still, this comment is potentially very telling, because it summarizes what the APAAS program used to be like and contrasts it with the way it is today. Like the access and fundraising comment, this one should raise a red flag. The review doesn't mention that APAAS is offered in other Irvine schools and implemented differently at each one—an important point for parents considering this program. But the comment clearly points to the need for further research if you're contemplating enrolling your child in the APAAS program at this particular school.
In the next Edupinion post, we'll examine another, very different review of this school. And in the coming months we'll offer a multi-part, in-depth look at the IUSD's ambitious but flawed APAAS program as an example of what to look for—and avoid—in differentiated education for academically advanced students.
