Does Your State Provide Good Data On Your Schools? Probably Not

Title: Does Your State Provide Good Data On Your Schools? Probably Not

Publication: NPR

Date: 12/3/2016

Author: Elissa Nadworny

URL:http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/12/03/503775062/does-your-state-provide-good-data-on-your-schools-probably-not

Key Points: The article present a report from the Data Quality Campaign, which they spent 100 hours last summer looking at report cards and data of all 50 states, and found complicated tables and spreadsheets, broken links, missing data, out-of-date, and a lot of numbers and figures without

meaning. However, the article did state the just because the researchers couldn't find the data doesn't mean that states aren't reporting it. All states are required to have report cards each year to comply with state and federal law. However,  there are no requirement to make that information easily available and understandable.

There finding include:

• Just four states had all the information initially required under the previous federal education law, No Child Left Behind.
• Six states did not appear to have data on English language learners academic performance.
• 13 states did not break their performance data down by gender.
• About half of states included a non-academic measure of quality.
• 11 states had old data, from the 2010-11, 2012–13 or 2013–14 school years.
• in 18 states, it took analysts three or more clicks from the search engine results to find the data

Relevance: Teachers and schools are getting ever growing pressure to produce results and this effort may be lost if these result are not reported correctly. Also, this information needs to be presented correctly to the public so parents and teachers have correct information to either direct choices and instruction. However, just looking at this inform doesn’t really tell you about a school or a district.In my school district the school doesn’t given “D’s”, so student need a 70% to earn credits. But down the street in another district this isn’t the case.