A Report Card on DESE’s Report Card

A new report from the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) has evaluated each state’s report card system for public schools. The report, State Secrets: How Transparent Are State School Report Cards About the Effects of COVID?, gives each state a letter grade based on the ease of finding longitudinal data on school performance. Missouri earned a B grade, despite some data, such as student growth measures, not being available. The grading scale, it seems, might have been a bit generous. The comments for Missouri read:

• Bare bones design—mostly just large tables of data with no explanation.
• The report card shows data for indicators that are not appropriate given the school level (e.g., graduation rates shown for elementary schools as a large table full of asterisks.)
• Allows side-by-side year selection, but data presentation is unclear.

Interestingly, the website’s overall usability seems to not have factored into the grade. Missouri was one of 11 states whose website usability was rated as “poor.”

While I might quibble with the letter grades assigned by CRPE, the analysis and recommendations seem on point. For example, the authors recommend enhancing usability and increasing transparency. These are two issues the Show-Me Institute analysts have long argued for.

With a new commissioner in town, now is the time for the state board of education and the commissioner to make data accessibility and transparency a key goal of the department. Missourians have a right to know how their schools are performing.