Finding a Good Preschool

Being a founding member of the School Rating Scoundrels Club (see my Aug. 1 column), I have often thought about how to assess different kinds of schools.

I think colleges and high schools have useful and accessible points of comparison, some better than others. Middle schools can be compared by measuring how well each does in helping students complete the first year of algebra and the first year of a foreign language. I don't see any way to compare elementary schools, except with average test scores, and that's just a proxy for parental income and education.

And then we come to preschools. They have always struck me as beyond any sensible rating system, which is why I was stunned to find a new Web site, www.savvysource.com, trying to prove me wrong.

I know how my wife and I, and our friends, found preschools when we had children that age. We asked each other if we knew of any good ones. That was not, obviously, a very intelligent approach to the problem. But what else could we do? There wasn't, and there still isn't, much information out there, other than the yellow pages. And who has time to call or visit a long list of preschools until you find one you like?

The Savvy Source founder, Stacey Boyd, and her team of mostly young mothers like herself think the Internet could be the solution if they plug into it enough worthwhile information -- particularly the views of parents who have had children in the preschools being rated. They are supplying parents and school directors with their survey forms and rating schools on philosophy, teaching quality, discipline, safety, tuition and several other factors.

Their national Web site went up in March, and Boyd said she thinks they are close to "turning a modest profit." She said she has more than 100 staffers, mostly parents, collecting information for the Web site. "Our goal is to help parents make better decisions for children first and foremost, but structuring the company in a way that allows this army of incredibly talented moms to also earn a salary is very exciting for us too," Boyd said. The early results are impressive enough, I think, to inspire competition and start a whole new chapter in the saga of school rating.

I am not surprised to see Boyd behind this venture. I met her a decade ago after she had, at age 26, started a successful charter school in Boston. Then she created a Web-based tool for diagnosing student progress in elementary school classrooms. Now she has become Ms. Savvy Source. At 37, Boyd is one of a number of young educational entrepreneurs who are remaking our schools. They will likely be setting national and state educational policy for the next several decades.

They are risk takers, which means that many of their experiments, like Savvy Source, might not work. Perhaps Boyd will discover that most young parents prefer to go with the preschools in their neighborhoods, or the ones their friends use, or the ones their mothers tell them about, rather than ones recommended by strangers on a Web site.

I suspect other people before Boyd thought about creating a preschool rating Web site, but rejected the idea as too labor intensive. There are some Web sites, like www.preksmarties.com, that attempt to list every preschool. But I could find none that try to rate every one, as is Savvy Source's goal.

If you think about it, the need for this kind of service is pretty obvious, even to non-entrepreneurs like me. The idea came to Boyd and her friend Andrea Evans two years ago. Both were living in San Francisco and had just given birth to their first children. Boyd has an MBA from Harvard. Evans, a criminal defense litigator, has a law degree from that same university. They were bright and accomplished, the kind of people used to getting things done, but when they tried to do their customary due diligence in search of future preschools for their children, they floundered.

Boyd discovered that there was no complete list of San Francisco preschools. Evans was told they had to start applying to preschools immediately if they wanted to get into one of the good ones.

"It sounded like a horribly inefficient way of doing things," Boyd said. Evans said the absurdity of some of the preschool application questions, like what were her barely born child's hobbies, got to her. "Stacey and I started talking about it and realized that even if your child was three years old and you could satisfactorily complete an application, and you knew what type of preschool you wanted, there was not much information available to help parents navigate the preschool search," she said.

Evans now works as Savvy Source's San Francisco city lead, the business' director for that region. She also heads up the company's marketing and public relations efforts. She has eight parents in San Francisco whose data on that city gets several hundred visits a day. She contacts online parents groups, sets up participation in educational fairs and works to expand the brand.

Ashley O'Neill, the Savvy Source Dallas area city lead, is also a lecturer in writing at Southern Methodist University. She has six parents in her area compiling information, and manages a dozen other teams around the country.

Boyd said Savvy Source now offers information on 55,000 preschools, about 95 percent of the national total. She said in more than a dozen metropolitan areas, 80 percent of the preschools are rated with detailed parent surveys. This may be an idea whose time has finally come.

Hopefully, the more bright young people there are like Boyd assessing schools, the less unsavory will be the reputation of us school raters among educators, who as a rule don't much like being evaluated, particularly by people they don't work for. In any case, I have welcomed Boyd and her team as the newest members of the School Rating Scoundrels Club, and I hope their numbers increase.