Hi -- congratulations on your impending move. Boston is lovely. I hope your move will go well and you'll settle in quickly.
The first thing you need to do before you move is cast out of your mind everything you know about the British system(s) and try not to project prior experience in Britain onto what you will find in Boston.
A lot of British expats assume private schools are the way to go for education. This is hardly ever the case in the US. Despite what you may have seen on TV about mayhem, violence and terrible educational outcomes, the vast majority of American public schools are great and if you are behind your children they will do really well. They will succeed despite the lack of uniforms and despite not being taught formal reading at age 4.
In the case of public schools (state schools) in the US, what makes all the difference between schools is where the school is. In general, the schools in a well off suburb/municipality/township perform better than those in less well off areas.
Municipalities/suburbs/townships have their own school systems, usually called Districts which are partially supported by property and sales taxes exacted from residents and shoppers within each District and partially supported by each state. There are 147 municipalities in the Boston metro area and even more in greater Boston.
This map is colour coded for your convenience The darkest blue districts are considered the best.
You can only attend a given public school (whether elementary, middle or high school) if you live within the District boundaries. School Districts usually employ administrators to verify residence and you can be prosecuted and required to reimburse a school district for tuition if you attempt to send a child to a school while living outside the District. So when you have school age children it is really important to find out what the good school districts are and to only look for somewhere to live within those districts. There is no lottery when registering. You don't make a list with three+ schools and get assigned to one. School Districts are obliged to educate all those children who register and whose residence within the District is verified. They are obliged to provide an appropriate education for all SN children in-District too.
Within the city of Boston itself however, there are hundreds of schools. Each school has its own catchment area within the overall school district. Generally, you can't cross catchment boundaries within a District that has more than one school. Here is a Zillow ranking of public elementary schools in Boston (city District), based on the Great Schools organisation rubric. Great Schools always takes twenty minutes to load on my computer for some reason but you can googld Great Schools Boston or Boston region.
Interpreting the stats is difficult as the comments under this Boston Magazine thumbnail guide show. The most intelligent comments are made by a contributor named MarkinArl:
'Unfortunately the state data is inaccurate. Does cost per pupil always include all costs like administration, buildings, special ed, and early ed? Does not look like it. How many students in each district take the MCAS, and SAT? Do special ed students take it? How many don't? How much money is spent on students on normal tracks and how much for special ed? Teacher-student ratio for each? Surely, parents of children in both categories want to know what services to expect for their children. Other demographic data would be useful. What is the median income, family size, and education levels of parents (as opposed to residents, where many might be single professionals) in each district? Median home price and rents in each district?'
with a response by OhioMan:
'There may well be issues with the data, but you hit on the real issue at the end. We don't have much ability to gauge the performance of these schools based on these rankings. We do know that these towns vary quite a bit with regard to who lives there. Without controlling for massive variables such as income and even whether English is a student's first language, these statistics just show you where the advantaged tend to live in Massachusetts (or perhaps where the disadvantaged tend not to live), not which schools are doing the best jobs of educating their students. If you sort by lowest Grade 3 test scores, you'll note that some of the schools that start with the worst performing students end up with much higher scorers by 10th grade. For the average student, those schools may be "better" than a school that takes kids from say 85 to 95.'
'The only somewhat fair apples-to-apples comparisons that you can really make are student-teacher ratio, average class size, and per-pupil spending, and you'll see that these don't correlate with the ratings, as they are vastly outweighed by the 15 out of 20 categories that are based on test scores. If your school's test scores are low, even if it produces tremendous gains over the years, it will score low. Really, they could probably just include one of the three spending-related categories and one of the 15 test-score-related categories (the other two are graduation rate and college rate) without losing any predictive value. They should replace Grade 3, 5, and 8 scores with a measure of improvement between grades 3 and 10.'
When looking at that particular table, ELA is English Language Arts. SAT is Scholastic Aptitude Test, AP exams are Advanced Placement exams. Advanced Placement courses are higher level honours courses that in general students who are considering selective, very selective and extremely selective universities would take. 5 is the highest score possible on an AP exam. A score of 3 would be pretty ho hum because universities generally don't allow students to waive a subject requirement in your freshman year of university unless you have scored a 4 or in a lot of cases a 5. Anything lower than a 4 and you would have completely wasted your time taking your AP course...
MCAS is the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System.
You would be smart to rent for a while in a promising District while keeping your ears and your minds open to other possibilities..
Renting in the US is a different proposition from renting in Britain (well England anyway). Renters are considered residents for the purposes of School District registration. Tenants have more rights than in Britain and there are more comfortable, purpose built apartment buildings. Discrimination on the basis that a family has children or pets is illegal. In more built up areas parking comes at premium prices however.
In general, when you've scouted a good few school district assessment websites, you will find a pattern. While each individual website may seem very dense and hard to understand, after you've seen a good few you will start to notice the same names cropping up frequently as good districts. Then you have to figure out how much you can afford by way of a home and what is available.
Again, I highly recommend renting.