“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

Did you know that in addition to the DC School Report Card, OSSE publishes many administrative data sets for public use each year? And that the division of Data, Assessment, and Research (DAR) works with OSSE’s program divisions and CIO’s office to fulfil hundreds of unique data requests in addition to completing required reporting? We do!

You can navigate to the Data & Reports page from the OSSE homepage – osse.dc.gov – using the Topics → Data & Reports dropdown menu. Suppressed versions of these responses and data files live online for public use. We’d like to give you a tour!

Quick Stats at the top of the Data and Reports page give it to you straight. If you want to know how many schools, students, or what percentage of students represent a particular group across DC, this is a great place to start. As a bonus, most information is updated each school year.

You can also browse down the Data and Reports page to access detailed information by topic including Assessments, Attendance, Discipline & Mobility, DC School Report Card & STAR Framework, Early Learning, Enrollment, HS Graduation & Postsecondary Readiness, School Health & Wellness, and Special Populations. At the bottom of the page, OSSE shares prior year oversight and budget responses so that you can review the information OSSE shares with DC Council.

Let’s dive in!
Many links on this page direct you to downloadable Excel workbooks that offer point-in-time snapshots of analyses at the state, local education agency (LEA), or school level. You can use these workbooks to answer questions about a school in your neighborhood or to compare between schools or LEAs.

There are also reports with charts and recommendations, too, so that you can learn more about trends and hot takes on specific topics like attendance. For example, OSSE shares both the 2023-24 Mid-Year Attendance Brief and the 2022-23 report and data under the Attendance Report section.

But wait, there’s more! Many recurring datapoints are available in annual files back to the 2016-17 school year. For example, OSSE’s early learning and enrollment audit annual reports and data are produced by DAR with CIO the Office of Enrollment & Residency, and the Division of Early Learning to inform our community about how many learners are participating in public education in DC annually.

We recognize that these data are static, meaning not real-time. However, in the spirit of balancing transparency and protecting student and educator privacy, the administrative data we can share are published for your use – parents to councilmembers.

And OSSE’s data modernization efforts are a part of our Strategic Plan Priority to Reimagine Systems. As we make progress on that priority our data infrastructure changes will improve data quality, help us all measure the impact of everyone’s time and resources, and inform future planning. We are also looking forward to creating more dynamic data visualizations.

For now, chances are, if you have a question about an education topic, and OSSE collects the data, there will be a data set for you on the Data and Reports page. We hope you’ll check it out!

Learn More
You can always access the Data and Reports page at osse.dc.gov/page/data-and-reports-0 or navigate to it under the Topics dropdown menu in the Homepage navigation bar.