In the world of DC-education-data, the launch of the DC School Report Card is a big day!
One of OSSE’s key roles as the state education agency in the District is to collect and report data. OSSE is committed to data transparency and access of information. The DC School Report Card features comparable data for all public and public charter schools in the District. There is a lot of data on this website, which launched on Dec. 1 – attendance, graduation, assessment, teacher and school leader information, and school profile information on specific school offerings.
Prior to the DC School Report Card launching for the first time in 2018, data for all 200+ schools across 70+ local education agencies (LEAs) were hard to find, not comparable, and/or not accessible to the public. Now, due to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), every state is federally required to publish a state report card. In the District, we go beyond the federal requirements under ESSA and take extra care to publish as much data as we can and make it as easy to understand as possible. OSSE is committed to transparency and making sure that educators, students, families, caregivers, policy makers, and residents have accurate and reliable information to make informed decisions.
Putting the DC School Report Card together requires a great deal of collaborative work to decide what will go on the website, how to design it, and make sure that everything is accurate. This year, OSSE built the site completely in house. Between public feedback, writing and updating the business rules, collecting data, cleaning the data, developing the website, calculating all the metrics, and collaborating with LEAs to verify the accuracy of the data, the DC School Report Card takes a full 12 months of work from start to finish. We have already started working on the 2024 version!
We get some questions about why we publish the DC School Report Card and its data in the late fall. Our target is to get the site ready in time for EdFEST so that parents, caregivers, and students will have as much information as we can provide to inform their decision-making about the MySchoolDC lottery. The data takes time to get right. Since we are reporting on the previous school year, most of the data is not available until the school year ends in June. We have to comb through all of it to make sure there are no errors, like students being counted twice. Some metrics, like student growth, take longer to calculate. During the summer and early fall, staff from every LEA review and confirm the accuracy of every last detail of the data that is used to populate the site. We are grateful for everyone who pitched in to help create this valuable public resource.
We hope that you find the DC School Report Card useful! We will continue to enhance and update the site. If you want to learn more about different data points, please check out our posts on student growth and summative scores.
#DCSchoolReportCard