The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) has been leading a number of coronavirus (COVID-19) recovery programs and one of the most significant investments is our High-Impact Tutoring (HIT) initiative. OSSE is providing grants to scale evidence-based tutoring programs.

We are required by the US Department of Education (USED) to differentiate school performance in our school accountability system. We get a lot of questions about what “differentiate” means. Basically, we have to figure out how to use data to place each school on a continuum from highest performing to lowest performing that we need to identify for school improvement (you can learn more about that process in our previous post on the subject).

As discussed in the previous Data Discovery post about summative school scores, OSSE has federal responsibilities as the state education agency for DC to make school support designations using our own built-in-DC school accountability system. The designations have technical-sounding names, so this post aims to describe them in common terms.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) to use its US Department of Education (USED) and State Board of Education (SBOE) approved statewide accountability framework to regularly designate the lowest-performing schools for additional support from OSSE. In this post, we explain how we calculate these school-level summative scores.