School picker
A weighted ranking of every Israeli school from public Ministry of Education data, built to shortlist an elementary school for one family.
2026 · Own product · Side projects
About
Choosing a school means comparing numbers the Ministry of Education spreads across several sites, on different scales and years. School Picker gathers them into one place, shows every number with its source and year, and lets the family set the weights that matter to them. A missing value is shown as missing rather than quietly treated as average, and the whole thing is readable in Hebrew on a phone.
Why I built it
Every year the Ministry of Education publishes a little less, and what it does publish is scattered across sites, scales and years. When we started looking at schools I found no single place that put it all side by side, and I happen to enjoy exactly that kind of work, taking messy data and making it answer a question. So I wrote a ranking that weighs every school at every stage by what matters to us. The first version taught me that I did not really understand what each weight meant, and every gap I found became a feature, from honest handling of missing values to the paths between schools. The question underneath was never just which school. It was where a family like ours should live.
What it does
- All the data in one place
- Ministry transparency data, surveys, test scores and map data for every school in the country.
- Your priorities, your weights
- A short questionnaire about what matters most sets the weights, not a ranking chosen elsewhere.
- Honest about gaps
- A missing value counts neither for nor against a school, and the coverage is shown.
- Every number sourced
- Each value carries where it came from and which year.
- Paths between stages
- Elementary, middle and high school chains ranked together, by distance and town.
How it works

Built with
Python · JavaScript · Leaflet · OpenStreetMap / Nominatim · CBS statistical areas · pytest · Playwright · systemd
At a glance
- STACK
- Python · open data
- STATUS
- in use
My role. Designed and built the data collector, the scoring model and the Hebrew interface.
Screens





