The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) has been leading a number of coronavirus (COVID-19) recovery programs and one of the most significant investments is our High-Impact Tutoring (HIT) initiative. OSSE is providing grants to scale evidence-based tutoring programs.
The District wants all students who are learning English to progress to full proficiency in the language. Students are screened for English proficiency in their schools either early in the school year or upon their arrival in the school and are determined to be an English learner (EL) if they need additional support. OSSE tracks the progress of our ELs by using an annual assessment called the WIDA ACCESS for ELLs (or just ACCESS) which tests students on listening, speaking, reading and writing in English.
We are required by the US Department of Education (USED) to differentiate school performance in our school accountability system. We get a lot of questions about what “differentiate” means. Basically, we have to figure out how to use data to place each school on a continuum from highest performing to lowest performing that we need to identify for school improvement (you can learn more about that process in our previous post on the subject).
In the world of DC-education-data, the launch of the DC School Report Card is a big day!
As discussed in the previous Data Discovery post about summative school scores, OSSE has federal responsibilities as the state education agency for DC to make school support designations using our own built-in-DC school accountability system. The designations have technical-sounding names, so this post aims to describe them in common terms.
Students and their caregivers have a lot of school options to choose from in the District, so we do our best at OSSE to give them face time with their prospective school communities. EdFEST, DC’s annual public school fair is back in person for the first time since 2019, ahead of the My School DC lottery application opening.
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) to use its US Department of Education (USED) and State Board of Education (SBOE) approved statewide accountability framework to regularly designate the lowest-performing schools for additional support from OSSE. In this post, we explain how we calculate these school-level summative scores.
Students, educators and caregivers celebrate amazing academic successes every day in the District. As the state education agency for the District, OSSE has the unique challenge of findings ways to accurately measure student growth at the state level. Remember, the District has 71 local education agencies (LEAs) – one school district per square mile – and each has a different approach to curriculum, instruction, grading and many other aspects of the school experience. We need to use common measures, which is why our high-quality statewide assessments are so important.
The time has come. The PARCC consortium has ceased to exist; states have amicably gone their separate ways, and DC is striking out on our own. Our new assessment system is called the DC Comprehensive Assessments of Progress in Education (DC CAPE) to capture the heroism of our students who are growing toward their college and careers. DC CAPE is by DC, for DC.
The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) released Special Education Performance Reports (SEPRs) in September 2023. The annual reports are designed to evaluate the performance of a local education agency’s (LEA’s) special education program and pinpoint OSSE supports for the LEA to build educator and system capacity to serve students with disabilities. Additionally, this report is designed to provide LEAs and families with meaningful information about LEA progress toward improving outcomes for students with disabilities.
