Are state report cards on district performance to blame if parents do not have a complete picture of academic achievement, attendance and other key student success indicators?
Researchers at the Center on Reinventing Public Education posed the question, examining whether parents in various states could go online and easily find details about school performance that would reveal the full impact of the pandemic. Such information could inform decisions in school-choice states or allow families to put pressure on struggling schools, the researchers contend in a new report, “How Transparent Are State School Report Cards About the Effects of COVID-19?”
“We have lots of suggestive evidence that parents don’t understand the magnitude of the COVID-19 downturns in achievement or attendance, or at least aren’t as concerned as experts think they should be,” the researchers wrote. “Is that because school report cards aren’t leveling with parents about how these outcomes have changed since before the pandemic?”
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Report cards were graded based on the clarity of the data and whether they provided year-to-year comparisons—going back before COVID—on academic growth in core subjects, chronic absenteeism, high school graduation rate and English learner proficiency. States were also ranked on how easy the report card web pages were to navigate.
Seven states got an A: Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.
Here are the remaining states by grade:
- B: Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, Nebraska, North Carolina, Washington
- C: Alabama, Colorado, DC, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Texas, Virginia
- D: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Iowa, Massachusetts, Montana, West Virginia, Wisconsin
- F: Alaska, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Wyoming
Some 35 states earned a C or lower, the researchers noted. “If the federal government is going to require states to provide report cards, and if states are going to spend money to create them, shouldn’t they at least be usable?” the researchers asked. “What purpose are these report cards serving if an average parent or advocate cannot figure out how to use them to answer basic questions about school effectiveness?”
The report urges states with fewer resources to work together to standardize models for user-friendly and data-rich report cards. “Over and over again, we found ourselves lost in a sea of tabs, buried under piles of disaggregated data, or perplexed by confusing visualizations,” the researchers added. “States simply must do better.”
Five states were rated “great” for usability:
