A school’s website is its marketing, but it’s also its first disclosure document. Here are nine things to look for — and, for each one, the free check that settles it in minutes. Published August 22, 2026.
“Montessori” isn’t a protected term — any school can put it on a website, whether or not the classrooms follow the method. The site is where the claims live, so it’s where your vetting should start. None of the flags below is a verdict on its own; a wonderful small school can have a terrible website. Each one is a prompt: something to check yourself, or to ask about directly on the tour. What should genuinely worry you is a site that trips several at once — because the pattern underneath them all is the same: the less a school discloses, the more work you should do before trusting the label.
No head of school, no directors, no teachers — just “our passionate educators.” Disclosure of who actually teaches is the single sharpest thing a school website can offer, which is why our directory rates every school on exactly this: green means the school names its teaching staff with their credentials, amber means leadership only, red means nobody at all. A school asking for $20,000–$60,000 a year can reasonably be asked who will be in the room with your child.
Real Montessori credentials come from checkable bodies: AMS (American Montessori Society), AMI (Association Montessori Internationale), or a MACTE-accredited training program. A site that names the body is making a claim you can verify; a site that says only “Montessori-certified” or “Montessori-trained” is making one you can’t. The same goes for New York State certification — some excellent schools hire on NYS Early Childhood certification and treat the Montessori diploma as a plus; that’s a legitimate model, but a transparent school says so plainly.
“Fully accredited,” “recognized Montessori institution,” membership in bodies you can’t find — accreditation language is where claims drift most, and we know because we audited our own directory and were wrong in nine places. The real registers are public: AMS lists its member and accredited schools at amshq.org, AMI-USA lists its recognized schools, and the IB lists authorized schools. If a school claims a status, it should appear in the corresponding register under its own name — our accreditation check shows the current register result for every school in the directory, and the three-minute method for checking any school yourself.
Five-star widgets, “Best Preschool” badges from listing sites, aggregator grades. These are marketing products, not oversight — the sites that issue them routinely carry glowing pages for schools that closed years ago. A badge wall isn’t disqualifying, but notice when it’s doing the work that named teachers and a checkable accreditation would normally do.
“Tuition on request” is common in NYC and perfectly legal — but it costs you a tour visit per school just to learn whether the number is $30,000 or $60,000. Schools that publish a full schedule-by-age matrix are extending you a courtesy; our tuition page collects every published figure in one comparable format, and flags the schools that publish nothing. Worry more when the opacity is total: no tuition, no fees, no application-fee amount, nothing.
Independent nonprofit with a board? A family-run LLC? A campus of a national chain? Ownership shapes how a school behaves under pressure, and it’s knowable — every profile in our directory records the operator and permit-holder of record where the public record shows one. A site that presents a chain campus as if it were an independent neighborhood school, or names no operating entity at all, is leaving out something you’d want to know.
Open-house dates from a season that already ended, a calendar for a school year that’s over, tour forms that lead nowhere. We re-check school pages weekly for the directory and stale admissions pages are one of the most common things we find — including dates that look current because the page doesn’t say which year they belong to. Check the day-of-week: a “Monday, November 3” open house is a 2025 date, not a 2026 one. A neglected website doesn’t prove a neglected school, but currency is cheap — and a school that can’t update a webpage is telling you something about its administrative bandwidth.
Be fair here: many good schools show no children’s faces, for privacy reasons that deserve respect. The flag isn’t missing children — it’s missing rooms. Montessori is a method you can see: low open shelves, complete material sets, child-scale furniture, room to move. Stock photography or renderings where the actual environment should be is worth noting, and easy to resolve: ask to observe a real work period, which is question 3 on our tour list.
In New York City, group child care for children under six requires a Health Department permit under Article 47 of the Health Code, and the city publishes every permitted program — with its permit status, capacity and inspection results — on its public Child Care Connect lookup. A school that says “licensed” without naming the permit is still checkable: search the address, not just the name, since permits are often held under a different legal entity. Every under-six program in our directory carries its live register record on its profile, refreshed weekly.
The inverse of the list: named humans with named credentials; accreditation stated precisely and matching the register; a real tuition schedule; the operating entity named; this season’s dates; the actual rooms; a permit you can look up. No school is perfect on all seven, and polish itself proves nothing — the questions that matter are about disclosure, not design. When a site leaves most of them open, that’s not a reason to walk away; it’s the list of things to ask, in person, with our tour questions in hand.