In my day job, I create web tools to display achievement data and best practice information about California public schools. So, I have a little experience working with school data and presenting it.

Today, Governor Schwarzenegger's office released SchoolFinder.ca.gov, a new web site designed to bring "together information about California’s schools and makes it easily accessible for parents." I have admit that I'm completely underwhelmed. The interface to finding your school is fine, but once you've found it, other than a cool map which shows a dot nearby your school (school campuses are too large to be accurately located on the map), the provided information is really too basic to be useful.

The only academic performance data provided is a single year's school-wide Academic Performance Index (API). How are parents supposed to know if a school is improving or declining? How is a parent supposed to know if their African American or Hispanic student will have a good opportunity for success? Without individual subgroups scores or results over time, this site is basically useless for school choice decisions. Parents would be much better served by visiting Just for the Kids - California.

The only financial data provided is a single $/ADA figure for the district. There are no details on revenue or expenditures on the site and nothing giving the parent any clues as to whether funding has been increasing or decreasing or how it is being spent. Parents would be much better served by visiting Ed-Data.

With the exception of the maps, there's nothing on this site that isn't done better by commercial sites such as GreatSchools or the non-profit SchoolDataDirect. Considering that Microsoft and Google were involved in this project, it is quite surprising that this web site is so completely devoid of valuable information.