

Show HN: Find the best public schools in California - kpommerenke
http://calschools.net/

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kpommerenke
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.

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kk3
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.

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

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ahulak
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

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kpommerenke
Nice looking website, but where are the standardized testing data?

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ahulak
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

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jason_slack
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.

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kpommerenke
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.

