The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) is required by federal law to measure school performance using an accountability system that is approved by the US Department of Education (USED) (you can read about how we measure performance for traditional schools in this blog post). OSSE has taken significant steps to revamp its accountability system for alternative schools by December 2025.
When you open a DC School Report Card page, you may wonder, “where does OSSE get all of this information?” It is a lot of information – some of the underlying data files have millions of cells of data.
One of the questions we hear is “how do we know OSSE data is accurate?” The quick answer is that OSSE does not publish anything without confirming its accuracy. Collecting, confirming and publishing data is a year-round process that is divided into three distinct efforts:
OSSE reports both four-year and five-year adjusted cohort graduation rates (ACGR) for public schools in the District, in accordance with US Department of Education guidelines. We calculate these two rates by taking the number of students who graduate with a regular high school diploma in either four or five years and divide by the number of students who form the adjusted cohort for the graduating class.
“The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component [webpage] is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.” ~ Douglas Adams
As we discussed in previous data blogs, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) is in the first year of collecting course data and has received data about 16,487 courses from all 72 local education agencies (LEAs) in the District. To keep everything clear, organized and consistent, each course has a corresponding code. For example, to examine English courses, we simply pull the list of courses that start with “01.” In this blog, we are going to focus on literacy curriculum.
For the first time, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) officially launched a statewide course data collection in the 2023-24 school year. As discussed in a previous data blog on statewide course data, the primary goals of this data collection process include but are not limited to:
Are you a parent who is eager to know and compare different courses being offered across the District? Are you a local education agency (LEA) that has received transfer students from another LEA but having trouble interpreting their previous transcript or coursework?
The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) is always looking to improve the quality of data that we collect and share with the community, particularly when it can connect to other data and enhance our ability to help families make decisions. For example, we know that deciding how to rank schools in a school lottery application has broad impact and we want to ensure that each family has the information needed to make choices based on their different priorities.
In December 2023, OSSE announced the launch of the new DC School Report Card site at schoolreportcard.dc.gov. The redesigned website shares education data from the 2022-23 school year on attendance, student growth, graduation and much more. OSSE is excited about the release of the 2023 DC School Report Card, but we know the work isn’t done!
