The sites we were introduced to last week are interesting to me. I downloaded spacetime at home and have used it a lot; there are some bugs in it, like the ebay search not working at all. It's nice to learn about these sites that I might not ever know about if we didn't see them in class.
The IIRC page gives so much information to look at and decipher about our communities and their test scores that we may be fooled into thinking that is the only information we need. While there is a lot of information there, I think other variables come into play when it comes to these things. One example is how the community values education. In Abingdon, for instance, the community may not put as much emphasis in education as a Carbondale or Normal or Macomb where there are institutes of higher education. Communities like that, where the major employer is an education based facility, will probably put more emphasis in their families education. The old saying, "My dad works at the factory and he's doing fine, so I don't need school cause I'm just going to work there anyway," isn't part of the majority demographic. These factors can weigh heavily on the scores of a particular school. If the kid doesn't think they need school then why would they strive to do well on these tests?