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. Before OSSE publishes anything, every piece of information for every school has been reviewed and certified as accurate by its local education agency (LEA), ranging from the photo of the school to complex metrics like academic growth and accountability scores. As we first started talking about in our Data Validation post, collecting, confirming and publishing data is a year-round process that is divided into three distinct efforts:

1. The Annual Enrollment Audit & Child Count 
2. Data Validation 
3. Metric Calculation Confirmation (MCC)   

Data Validation is when OSSE works with LEAs to certify the accuracy of education data. MCC uses those certified data to laser focus on what we publish on the DC School Report Card. For example, during Data Validation, LEAs confirm the accuracy of their students’ individual statewide assessment scores (now known as DC CAPE). During MCC, LEAs check to make sure those scores add up to accurate median growth percentile and growth to proficiency. 

The MCC process is straightforward. It is basically an LEA-specific look under the hood of the DC School Report Card prior to publication. LEAs have time to review, ask questions, and make some changes to school information. For example, if a school has a new principal or WMATA bus route, LEAs can change those during MCC. They also have time to check our arithmetic, ask questions, and raise concerns about every piece of data or information we publish. OSSE and LEAs use the DC School Report Card Technical Guide to get on the same page and resolve any issues. MCC begins in the summer and wraps up in the fall so we can publish the DC School Report Card by December.   

Of course, some things do change throughout the school year, so OSSE does allow LEAs to update fields like the principal name on a quarterly basis. We want the DC School Report Card to be as easy to understand and access as possible. MCC helps us to get there so that residents can have the confidence to dig into the data and learn more about our schools and LEAs. We are grateful for the great work from our LEAs because we could not publish the DC School Report Card with any confidence without their care and attention.  

If you want to learn more about MCC, you can find the MCC Policy here. You can also find our DC School Report Card Technical Guide, which has been trimmed over time to a tidy 100 pages. It’s a page turner! Of course, the DC School Report Card is available at schoolreportcard.dc.gov.