DC offers students who may struggle to thrive in traditional academic settings alternative pathways to success. DC defines alternative schools and programs in several key pieces of legislation, which can create confusion. So, as DC updates its alternative accountability framework, we’d like to clarify exactly what this means. If you want to skip the legal background, scroll down to the section titled: ‘So, why does this matter?’

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.

OSSE reports both four-year and five-year adjusted cohort graduation rates (ACGR) for public schools in the District, in accordance with US Department of Education guidelines. We calculate these two rates by taking the number of students who graduate with a regular high school diploma in either four or five years and divide by the number of students who form the adjusted cohort for the graduating class.

As we discussed in previous data blogs, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) is in the first year of collecting course data and has received data about 16,487 courses from all 72 local education agencies (LEAs) in the District. To keep everything clear, organized and consistent, each course has a corresponding code. For example, to examine English courses, we simply pull the list of courses that start with “01.” In this blog, we are going to focus on literacy curriculum.