As avid readers of this blog already know, OSSE collects an enormous amount of data from our schools and local education agencies (LEAs) throughout the year. This requires a lot of collaborative work with LEAs (as covered in our Data Validation and Metric Calculation Confirmation posts) and once a year, we get to publish it for the public on the DC School Report Card.

State education agencies (SEAs) are federally required to publish report cards to inform the public; OSSE works hard to ensure that we are responsive to the needs of our community members about what we publish and how we design the website. We partnered with the State Board of Education (SBOE) to gather feedback from the public and then we got to work responding to what we heard.

To that end, we have new features this year:

• Comparing up to three schools across key metrics
• Deeper dive into school accountability data
• Multiple pictures of school communities (when applicable)

We have some new data to share this year, as well:

• Student-teacher ratios
• Student-staff ratios
• Referrals to law enforcement

In addition, we are excited that next year, we will be able to share:

• More robust school programming data (thanks to our course collection, which you can read about here, here, here, and here.)
• School climate survey data from students, school-based staff, and caregivers.

We understand and appreciate that every parent and caregiver has a different set of criteria for what is most important in a school, so we work hard that the user experience is simple and straightforward. We build the entire website in house with our Chief Information Officer (CIO) colleagues, which is a huge undertaking. We also make all of the data available as Excel files. We counted 1,403,735 cells of data between the twelve of them. A veritable feast of data!

You can always send feedback about the DC School Report Card to [email protected]. We hope you enjoy the site!