Specialized coursework provides students opportunities to receive advanced or technical education in specific academic subject and/or industry areas. Whether it be Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB), Career and Technical Education (CTE), or Dual Enrollment (DE), each DC public and public charter high school offers at least one type of specialized coursework.
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.
The DC School Report Card remains the District’s one-stop shop for all comparable data about public schools in the District of Columbia on a sleek, mobile- and tablet-friendly website. OSSE publishes the DC School Report Card every year to provide parents, families, and the public with as much helpful information about schools as we can, from bus lines that students use to get to school (which all received new names and routes from WMATA prior to the 2025-26 school year!) to student growth.
Over the past four years, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) has been working closely with every local education agency (LEA) in the District to create a new data set that will transform operations for DC’s education system – the Course Data Collection.
Throughout each fiscal year and school year, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) provides support to local education agencies (LEAs) to help their staff complete an array of requirements such as statewide assessments and attendance reporting. These requirements are often legally mandated, some locally and some federally, and present unique opportunities for internal collaboration across OSSE divisions and external collaboration across agencies—such as the Common Financial Reporting Standards (CFRS).
As you have learned from our previous posts on the topic, OSSE successfully administered the District-wide DC Survey About Your School (DC SAYS) for the first time in spring 2025 – we are excited to share that the topic-level data files (which will be used to populate the DC School Report Card) are now publicly available on our website. While we are just beginning the process of analyses of these dat
Public schools in the District of Columbia offer various types of specialized coursework. Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB) and Dual Enrollment (DE) courses provide college credit and college preparation, while Career and Technical Education (CTE) courses provide preparation for both career and postsecondary education as well as potential opportunities for college credit.
As the state education agency for the District of Columbia, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) is required by federal law to establish criteria, that are approved by the DC State Board of Education (SBOE), to measure public school performance and designate the lowest-performing schools for additional support and improvement. OSSE uses an accountability system to identify schools earning scores that place them in the lowest 5 percent of schools operating in DC.
The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) has been tasked by our State Board of Education (SBOE) to add school climate survey data to the DC School Report Card. To do this, OSSE spent three years developing, procuring, piloting, and iterating the surveys of students, staff and families before launching the DC Survey About Your School (DC SAYS) in the spring of 2025. For the project overall, we are delighted that we had such a strong administration, owing most of the credit to the schools that prioritized this new workstream during a busy year.
