School Rankings and Niche.com

Of the various school rankings, you often see Niche.com's cited on social media.  For their 2020 rankings of Best School Districts in New York (nb: they have many different versions of these lists), North Shore CSD came in at #35 out of 693 results.

So what's the difference between North Shore and some of our neighbors who ranked higher? Here are their Niche.com "report cards." All get an A+ in Academics (as with Teachers and College Prep). Why a range of 35 in the rankings?

How can this be? Look at their methodology. It's described here and and every one of these factors, to some extent, includes 'self-reported by Niche users', er,  data....where they appear to have very few data points given the number of surveys cited..

Niche.com is a commercial site running real estate ads. Want an alternative? This measure of student growth from Stanford shows North Shore outperforming many of these districts. This site ranks us second in Nassau County (only just squeezed out by Jericho). It's called School Digger and only uses test scores from NYSED.