The Schott Foundation for Public Education is one of the small number of foundations that unabashedly supports public educations and understands its importance in a democratic society. Under the leadership of its dynamic president, John Jackson, it seeks not to privatize schools but to make them much, much better places for children to learn and grow to their full potential.
Schott recently developed a new measurement, which it calls “the loving cities index.”
The brilliance of this measure is that it quantifies not test scores or other measures that can be corrupted and gamed, but measures the environment and those who hold the levers of power.
“As racism and hate continue to dominate the national dialogue, the Schott Foundation for Public Education released the Loving Cities Index, a multi-state report that aims to reverse historical local policies and practices rooted in racism and bias and replace them with policies that create local loving systems from birth and promote an opportunity to learn and thrive.
“By providing this new framework, the Loving Cities Index helps cities evaluate how well they are doing at providing all children – regardless of race, gender or zip code – with the supports and opportunities they need to learn and succeed. Noting that after decades of education reform, parental income remains the top predictor of student outcomes, the report challenges the notion that school-based reforms alone can provide students a fair and substantive opportunity to learn.
“The report also highlights a large and growing body of research showing a clear connection between economic and racial inequality and opportunity gaps in areas like housing, health care and community involvement. These issues lie outside of the traditional education realm, but are intimately linked to high school and college attainment.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This basically sounds good – certainly better than most other alternatives out there. But can we please stop using the word “measure”? You can’t measure anything to do with love, so we end up using a series of easily quantifiable approximations which create problems of their own.
And the 2018 Happiness Index report says that, Finland is the happiest country in the world, with Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland holding the next top positions. The World Happiness Report ranks 156 countries by their happiness levels, and 117 countries by the happiness of their immigrants.
Bellwether had an Education Innovation Index for cities, every bad reform idea you can imagine gave a city a high score.
It should be noted that the US came in 18th, down four places from last year. The top factors for the American decline in happiness include weakened social supports, government and business corruption and declining confidence in public institutions. It is time for our country to take a look at itself and our missteps including so called education reform .
Good followup
I hope this group expands its ratings to other cities and communities. We need more input other than the biased impression people get from “Great Schools.”
Measures? Nonsense! How about assess, evaluate or judge?