Creating School Accountability Reports

School Administrator, Nov, 1999 by Richard S. Brown

A researcher offers guidance on delivering what parents most want to know about their schools

School accountability report cards can serve a variety of purposes. They can inform the public. They allow district leadership to monitor progress toward goals and identify poorly performing schools for targeted intervention. They also give individual schools a chance to highlight accomplishments that might otherwise go unnoticed.

According to Education Week's 1999 report "Quality Counts," 36 states today produce school-level report cards. Many school districts in the other 14 states have created their own accountability reports, though these do not allow for statewide comparisons.

Twenty-six of the states that require school-level report cards make them available on the Web for easy access, but only 13 states require the report cards to be sent home to parents. Even fewer people apparently see these report cards, according to the Education Week report, which surveyed educators, taxpayers and parents.

Of educators, only 51 percent had even seen a school report card for their area. Only about 40 percent of the parents indicated they had seen a school-level report card. And for taxpayers it was only about 25 percent. Thus, a majority of people are not seeing the report cards even in areas where they are being produced. Clearly, the message is not getting out to a broad audience.

What's Presented?

Primarily, the school accountability report cards focus on student achievement, usually in the form of standardized test scores. All 36 states that require school report cards publish test scores as a part of their presentation. The second most common element is dropout rates, followed by graduation rates, post-graduation plans, advanced placement coursework and other course-taking activity.

But is this what people most want to see? Not really, according to a study of school accountability report cards by Beldon, Russonello and Stewart and Research/Strategy/Management, two public opinion research firms.

Their survey of parents, taxpayers and educators (counselors, principals and teachers) indicated that the single most important element they wanted to see addressed on a school-level report card is school safety. Right behind was teacher qualifications. These interests persisted across all three groups of respondents.

Those issues were followed, in order, by average class size, graduation rates and dropout rates. Only then did the survey respondents express interest in student performance data. What you conclude from such findings is that test score information is important, and the public expects it to be there. But it is not the most important need in the eyes of the user.

Another interesting finding was that student demographic data, like ethnic percentages and students with limited English proficiency, was considered by all groups to be the least important element of 21 pieces of information. This suggests that student demographics should be provided as a context and not as an explanation. It shouldn't be played up highly in the report card presentation.

Comparison Data

School report cards inevitably lead to comparison. Parents and educators want to see how a particular school rates in relation to national averages, state averages, district averages or similar schools. The district's leadership also may be interested in providing a comparison of performance against individual school goals.

In addition, the school's performance over previous years is desirable and relevant. Questions such as "How did the school do on this measure last year?" are common. When presenting multiple years of data, it may be possible to indicate a trend on particular measures.

The data should be presented with context in which to interpret it.

The issue to wrestle with here is deciding which comparisons are relevant and appropriate. At present, most school accountability report cards publish information from previous years and allow comparisons to be made between the school's performance and the state averages. District and national averages are less common, primarily because no national tests are given to all students in all states.

Summary Scores

As you present these assorted pieces of information, you must decide on the district level whether to combine all of the data into a summary score or to issue a grade for each school.

How to combine disparate data, particularly for schools that have different types of data elements and different scores from different tests is a tricky technical issue and should be attempted only when the summary measure can be established with good measurement qualities. In addition, the question of how to weight the different pieces of information to come up with a single summary score is important.

For the 1997-98 school year, a dozen states ranked all schools, usually into categorical assignments. That number will increase as education officials in California are currently devising a plan to create an Academic Performance Index score for each of the more than 8,000 schools in the state.