Give Parents Access to Useful Data
Strategy 2.2 Empower parents with clear and useful data.
Parents deserve to understand the quality of their options when selecting schools for their children. StudentsFirst will advocate for policies that require all districts to share understandable information about the performance of their schools, teachers, and students with parents and the public.
StudentsFirst will work to ensure parents have access to student-, teacher-, and school-level data without violating the privacy of individuals. Data is meaningless (and potentially misused or misapplied) if not properly explained and contextualized. We believe that parents and taxpayers not only have the right to access this data, but they also should be given the appropriate tools to understand it. Whether it is through school or teacher test score data, or through school or teacher scorecards, parents deserve to know what the data says about their child's performance.
There are a number of ways that data can be appropriately shared with parents to help inform decision-making and hold educators accountable. Some of the best practices in sharing data include:
- Publicly available information: state-provided school report cards that provide letter grades that can be used to compare performance with other schools. School-level data about teacher effectiveness should also be publicly disseminated so that parents and other stakeholders can identify inequities in teacher talent and problem areas in individual schools and regions.
- A customized report for families: annual academic growth reports that show where a child is performing relative to the norm in his or her school, district, and state. Growth charts should also predict a student's college-readiness based on current indicators, much as a pediatrician's growth chart predicts for parents how tall their child will be. The chart should include district-produced evidence demonstrating a teacher's success in moving his/her students along the growth curve for at least the past year but preferably over a teacher's entire career. For districts that have no growth model and teachers in untested grades and subjects, general evaluation data should be extracted from teacher evaluations to share with parents.
To have a truly robust data set that will move education reform forward, states must place a renewed emphasis on meaningful and accessible data. Consistent with the federal Race to the Top application, states must dedicate resources to develop a longitudinal data system that tracks individual student outcomes over time with:
- Data on each student as he or she changes schools from pre-kindergarten through graduate school and can be accessed in a timely fashion to inform teachers, school and district leaders, and parents; and
- Data that includes information about students, staff, educational institutions, financial aid, student employment, courses, facilities, finance, and educational credits.
Moreover, states should establish a public, state-level "growth model" to standardize student academic growth charts for parents. While these models may take time to develop, lack of a finished product must never be an excuse for why data cannot be used to drive decision-making in the interim.
Private schools participating in taxpayer-funded scholarship programs must also prove that they are operating with academic and fiscal accountability. No public dollars should go to private schools that cannot show results over time.
