Hi HN, my wife and I are both teachers and we've both worked in schools that looked really good on paper - good attainment, great inspection reports etc - but were not very nice places to work in. Speaking to friends, this is a common problem because almost all the publicly available information about schools is for parents, students and sometimes inspectors.

The things teachers care about you can only discover by talking to other teachers, but without a personal connection that's almost impossible. When applying for a new job, schools know a lot about the candidates but the opposite is rarely true. We're trying to redress the balance a bit with Chalkscore. We hope it will let teachers make a more informed decision about where to work, and in doing so, that it will exert a gentle pressure on schools to pay more attention to working conditions and environments for teachers.

Happy to answer any questions!

1) As someone who is committed to improving schools, what is your reaction to the current praise for schools in Finland? This video in particular makes Finland look almost incredible:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHHFGo161Os

2) In some places, the environment at the school is determined more by the district than the individual school, since there is mobility within the district. Have you thought about tracking reviews of districts?

Finland's reputation is well deserved! My wife took part in an exchange visit there and spent a week in a Finnish classroom. They are more selective for teacher trainees than the US and UK, and their training program is more rigorous than the UK, but once completed, teachers are trusted as professionals and left to do their jobs without being micro managed. There was also a lot more focus on subjects outside reading, writing and maths and a lot less focus on testing.

District reviews are on the road map!

Your link seems to be down. But I have a question regardless: how do you plan on making money?

thanks for the heads up. Should be working now.

Two options for revenue that I'm considering: charging schools for profiles with photos and videos aimed at potential candidates and job advertisements.

Great idea! My wife is a teacher and this was a big question for her.

The difficulty will be getting teachers to do this. Maybe start promoting in one geographic region?

It's definitely a pain point for many teachers. So far, the response from teachers has been overwhelmingly positive. The response from school leaders has been cautious at best.

Focusing on one region is a good idea!

Looks like a great start! Would be nice to be able to search by location only to know if any schools near me have been reviewed.

Added search by location and search by district today. I hope you find it useful!

Thanks, I'll be adding location search in the next few days

Two tips for a Show HN like this:

(1) You should add a comment to the thread giving the backstory of how you came to work on this, and explaining what's different about it. That tends to seed discussion in a good direction.

(2) On HN it's a bit of an antipattern to have your username be the name of your company or project. It creates a feeling of using the site for promotion and of not really participating as yourself. Better to have a username that represents you as a human being, which of course need not be your real name. (If you want to change your username, email us at [email protected] and we'll help.)

Good luck!

Dang,how in the world do you read so many comments and also maintain HN? Any tips/your workflow will be appreciated.

I'm not the only person who does it. sctb is the other public moderator.

We write software to try to keep on top of things.