How we work

A magazine whose motto is “We did the reading” had better show which reading. Here is the routine behind every piece, including the parts that make us slower.

The government document wins the argument

Before anything is published, each factual claim gets its own line in a private fact file with the document we checked it against and the date. The original document decides, and we add a second official source where one exists. When a state and a federal source disagree, we say so on the page.

On the page we link only to government sources: federal agencies, Congress, state governments, foreign governments. Studies are linked through federal research databases such as ERIC and PubMed. We do this so that you can read the same document we read, free, without passing through anyone with something to sell.

When a number is ours, we show the arithmetic

Some of the most useful numbers do not exist until someone combines two official sources. When we do that, the piece says so, shows the method in plain words right beside the result and marks it the way a teacher would want: worked on notebook paper, where you can follow each step.

The tables we built and the calculations we ran are free to reuse under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: credit Kidsomnia and link to the page. Government figures inside them stay under the agency’s own terms, and the text and images remain ours.

Rankings come with their full recipe

A ranking here publishes everything: which data, which years, how each measure is weighted, what was left out and why. Nobody can pay to enter or to move. Sort the table by change or by level. To weight the four tests your own way, the data file has each one. If we cannot explain a ranking in a paragraph, we do not run it.

We rank public systems on public data. We do not score private schools, tutoring companies or learning apps, because the public data needed to do that fairly does not exist.

What we refuse to publish

Rumors and predictions dressed up as dates. Anecdotes about parents and teachers who do not exist. Anything that repeats a page we already have with a new name swapped in. A page for each of the fifty states might be good for a publisher’s traffic, but a parent needs one honest comparison, so that is what we write.

We also do not change the date on a piece unless its meaning changed. When a piece is updated, it says what changed and when.

How often we publish

One news item on days when something real has happened, and a long piece or two a week. We would rather be the site you read twice than the site you scroll past.