Over the past year, OSSE has worked to build strong foundations with the ultimate goal of sustaining, accelerating, and deepening the progress being made in DC education. With this in mind, we present to you OSSE’s 2016 Annual Report.
 
Looking back on our work over the past year, we have much of which to be proud. You will read about some of our highlights in this report, such as:

• Our fulfillment of 314 data requests - a 44 percent increase from 2015;
• The elimination or streamlining of nine data collection and verification processes for our education partners. This made the data reporting process much less cumbersome and allows our educators to focus on what matters most: teaching and supporting our students;
• Awarding $89 million in childcare subsidies for 11,727 children. This means more kids are getting the strongest start possible on their education journey;
• Granting, on average, $6,853 per student, for 4,525 students through our DC Tuition Assistance Grant program. This means more students getting the funding they need to get to and through college;
• 85 percent of our staff agreeing that OSSE is moving in the right direction as an agency. This means our staff believe in the intentional efforts we are making to be a more transparent and focused agency; and
• An increase by DC’s public school students of 2 percent in ELA and 3 percent in Math on the 2016 PARCC Assessment. Additionally, this year OSSE took important strides to make PARCC results accessible to schools and families including releasing results 3 months earlier than the prior year, and simplifying simplified our individual student score reports for families, and making consumer-friendly updates to our public-facing website, results.osse.dc.gov, to make the data more usable for community members and leaders.

As you browse this report, we hope you will see the important strides we have made this past year toward building a resilient, mission focused agency. While what we do is with a laser focus on students, we could not have made this progress without the continued support of our education partners and families. Together, we can ensure all District residents, from infants and toddlers to adult learners, have access to a high-quality and equitable education.