What's a School Report Card?

It's that time if year those colorful reports arrive in the mail letting you know how your child did on New York State Math and English Language Arts (ELA) Assessments last spring. The bar charts let you know where your child stands in a range scale from one to four. Actually, the state does a pretty good job explaining what the numbers mean in terms parents can understand. More than likely your child's school included a cover letter breaking it down a little more and indicating what their criteria is for academic intervention services (AIS) for students that fall below the grade level threshold.

Sounds pretty simple, right? Where does all of the data come from and how do schools stack up against each other?  The state provides this information for the assessment results on data.nysed.gov known as School Report Cards. The site is fairly easy to understand but there is a lot of data to find if you just poke around a bit. You can take a look at specific groups by filtering the data by male/female, ethnicity,  grade, etc. when you click on the links to 3-8 ELA or math assessment data. There are archives to previous year's data as well.

State-wide information is great but you want to know about data closer to home. Navigating through the website pages you can find information broken down by county, BOCES,  districts and schools.  Once you are viewing data for math or ELA statewide or broken down to one of these groups, you can easily download the information as a PDF or compare the data with other specific groups by using their My Comparisons tool. This is also a great way to get a background on school districts out of your area if you are relocating to make informed decisions on where to make your new home.

There continues to be a lot of controversy on whether parents should refuse to have their child take state assessments.  (Also known as Opt-out.) Parents will campaign to get other parents to keep their kids from being tested, and even some teachers have been known to encourage test refusal. It's not the only criteria schools normally use to see if your child needs extra help. It does help gather data so districts can see trends and thresholds by comparing to state-wide data and within their own buildings and grade levels. What do they do with this data? They make informed decisions on curriculum to improve your child's education. While state assessments are just a piece of the puzzle, without the information school districts would not have guidelines to know where to target instruction.  You can see your child taking an assessment is more than just to see where your child stands in a range, the information provides a report card for your school district as compared to the state as a whole. This also helps the state decide what schools need improvement to intervene with resources to improve education.