There are hundreds of data points that describe your public schools, released by the State Department of Education. But accessing and interpreting them can be difficult. So that's why we created Your School.

Search for your school and see how it's doing on everything from teacher salary to physical fitness, and how it compares with other schools. Some notes:

Similar schools: Many categories compare a school to 'similar schools.' We used what are called "District Reference Groups" to group schools based on socioeconomic status and student needs, among other factors. An exaplantion of DRGs is here.

Why not test scores: There's been a lot of talk about test scores lately. But we didn't include raw test scores here for two reasons. First off, test score data is readily available here. Secondly, raw test scores aren't a great indicator for the strength of a school; rather, we included a school "CMT and CAPT classification" which rates schools based on how much their students improve.

This tool was created and maintained by data editor Alvin Chang. Send questions or comments to achang@ctmirror.org.