State Report Card “Makeovers”
October 20, 2017
Education Week takes a look at how ESSA is helping to give state report cards a “head-to-toe makeover,” in both their look and the data displayed. Under ESSA, states must present this information in an “easily accessible and user-friendly” manner, and with “plenty more data points than was required under No Child Left Behind.” Data points include spending, educator and administrator quality, discipline, and offerings such as pre-school, Advanced Placement, and International Baccalaureate. And all these data are “broken out by more than 10 student subgroups.” In total, a state must include “an estimated 2,107 data points about its public school system, the Council of Chief State School Officers predicts.” However, how to organize and display this “taxonomy of school success” has “sparked a wide-ranging debate over the politics of language, the explicit and implicit meanings of color shades, and what parents want—versus what they need—to know about their local schools.”