MIT researchers analyzed more than 800,000 online school reviews using advanced natural language processing, determining that reviews were largely associated with schools’ test scores — a measure that correlates closely with race and family income and tends to reinforce inequities in educational opportunity — rather than measures of student growth, which reflect how well schools actually help students learn. “Our hope is that parents who learn about our study will be highly discerning when they read school reviews and take what they are reading with a grain of salt, triangulating subjective…
