Methodology

We measure daycares against what's possible in their neighborhood — not just what wealthy neighborhoods can afford. The score above each listing is a residual: how the daycare performs relative to what its neighborhood predicts, controlling for ACS demographic context.

The score is small information, not the whole picture. Below it on every daycare page, we list what we don't know — turnover, curriculum, day-to-day classroom feel — so you can weigh those yourself.

Go deeper

• What CLASS scores actually predict (and don't)

  CLASS observation scores predict child outcomes — but only weakly, and the predictive signal has weakened in newer studies. Why we use them anyway, and how we weight them.

• How we rate daycares

  What the 1–5 star Overall rating means, what data goes into it, what's missing, and where the limits are. Written for a parent who wants the honest version, not the marketing version.

• Does our rating reinforce neighborhood segregation? We checked.

  We audit whether our 1–5 star Overall rating tracks the racial, income, or education makeup of a daycare's ZIP-code area. Across 15 ACS demographics on 222K daycares, every component passes our |r| < 0.25 threshold. Within-state, every |r| is under 0.03.

• What we don't track

  The fields we deliberately don't measure, and why each was left out. Counterpart to the per-daycare 'what we don't know' block.