Dive Brief:
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Most states (35) earned a C grade or worse when rated on the ease of finding information about longitudinal school-level student performance dating back to pre-COVID in an analysis released Thursday by the Center on Reinventing Public Education.
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Only seven states — Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Tennessee — earned an A for the ease of locating performance data on their websites. Thirteen states received F's, and the rest of the states were marked with B's, C's or D's.
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Even in states that earned high marks, the performance data was sometimes buried or not easy to disaggregate by student group. CRPE suggests states create more accessible and user-friendly school report cards so parents, educators and community members can identify areas of academic need and work on solutions.
Dive Insight:
While 2015's Every Student Succeeds Act requires states and districts to post academic performance annually starting with the 2017-18 school year, states are not required to specifically post data broken down at the school level.
But CRPE chose to examine that feature because of the compounding challenges schools face in helping students recover from COVID-19-era setbacks, said report co-author Morgan Polikoff, who is a professor of education at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California.
Some academic assessment results in recent years show stalled or slight improvements in math and reading scores compared to the height of pandemic-related school closures, but student performance is still not on trend with pre-pandemic learning growth trends.
Moreover, multiple studies have concluded that parents don't hold the same level of concern about pandemic learning loss despite what some state and national assessments scores reveal.
"There's this parent-expert disconnect, and one possible explanation is that parents are not getting clear evidence about the impact of COVID," said Polikoff.
In its examination of state report cards, CRPE found some states' menus for searching and selecting schools to be easy to use. Others were "sources of maddening frustration." Improving the accessibility and transparency of state-level report cards can help increase awareness about struggling schools, the report said.
Specifically, it provides three recommendations for states:
- Work together. States have flexibility in designing their own report cards, but CRPE suggests they coordinate on model templates and user-friendly designs.
- Focus on usability. Parents, educators and community members shouldn't get lost on a state's website trying to find student performance data. Rather, sites should be built with the user in mind.
- Be transparent. CRPE advises that lower-ranked states look at the A-rated states to see examples of how data was made transparent to users. The center also recommends that the federal government suggest or require an emphasis on transparency.
Polikoff said accessible and transparent data alone won't boost academic performance, but it could help as schools work to get students back to pre-COVID performance levels or higher.
"COVID was, we hope, a once-in-a-generation phenomenon that had these enormous impacts, and we still see that these effects are lingering," Polikoff said. If there's a lack of transparency about academic progress, "we just think there's not likely to be the urgency to press for continued resources and recovery," he said.
