Find Out How Your Local School Stacks Up With These Tools

California students are improving on statewide standardized tests. And on Monday the federal government recognized a bunch of California schools with Blue Ribbons. Twenty-three public schools and one private school from California got the award (list below).

To qualify they had to either be in the top rank by statewide standards, or have a student body made up of at least 40 percent disadvantaged students and show great progress on statewide standardized tests.

But if your local school is not a ribbon winner, is it still doing well? Or falling down on the job?

California tracks a welter of data on individual schools, and this month the state put it all into this website.

You can enter the name of a school, and out pops two pages of charts and graphs showing how its current numbers compare to its numbers in recent years, as well as how it compares to its school district and to the state as a whole.

Besides performance on standardized tests, the website shows the ethnic makeup of the school, the percentage "socioeconomically disadvantaged," average class sizes, the number of English language learners and other key numbers.

You can get some of the same data for the whole country from some independent websites, including GreatSchools.org or from SchoolDigger.com, both of which also offer reviews from users and give schools their own overall rankings.

Here are the California public schools that won Blue Ribbons:

And here is the private school: