But the state’s nearly two-years-in-the-making improvement effort, which was spurred by the conclusions of a federal audit, still falls well short of the best-in-class examples from other states, a national expert said.
Oregon’s new version of federally mandated report cards on schools and district performance no longer require members of the public to download PDFs and complex spreadsheets to analyze basic information about their child’s school, including class sizes, absenteeism, graduation rates and test results.
Instead, that information is presented online via data visualizations. Typing in the name of a school or a district brings up a webpage that displays charts and graphs about demographics, enrollment levels and per-pupil expenditures, benchmarked against state averages.
But the state’s update does not include the crucial ability to compare the average student’s growth across multiple years at a single glance to pinpoint improvements, plateaus or declines.
Instead each year’s data is displayed on a separate page.
Nor does the new tool display school level data from before the pandemic, when most schools and districts performed much better than they do now. Only state level pre-pandemic data can be accessed via a static link at the bottom of the page that takes users to a report produced after the most recent release of state testing data.
Easily allowing the public to compare current performance to that from before the pandemic is critical, said Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education, who was a lead author of the study on state report cards done for the nonpartisan Center for Reinventing Public Education.
Coronavirus containment efforts and school closures took a well-documented toll on both students’ learning and their well-being, and testing data suggests that Oregon students have been slower to rebound from pandemic lows than their peers in most other states.
Without the ability to easily compare pre- and post-pandemic metrics and clearly chart the losses, Polikoff noted, lawmakers and the public alike can get lulled into a false sense of security about how students and systems are faring.
“[The new report card] would not fare well even if we evaluated it again. It’s better in some small ways, but I don’t think it’s better in the big ways,” Polikoff said. “It’s still not really very transparent about how a school is doing. It’s still very difficult to compare schools with each other and to compare schools over time to pre-COVID.”
In a statement, Gov. Tina Kotek hailed the new Oregon report card tool, saying the days of the public being unable to easily access and understand how their schools were doing “changes today. The online report card shows that we’re focused on outcomes and transparency.”
Officials at the Oregon Department of Education acknowledged the tool’s lack of functionality for year-to-year comparisons during a media briefing this week. But they said the new options represent “a starting point.” The agency does not yet have the funding to build “a dynamic data dashboard to include accountability details,” said Dan Farley, the department’s assistant superintendent for research, assessment, data, accountability and reporting.
Instead, users will need to “identify which year of data you would like to look at, one year at a time,” Farley said. “The way it is designed is for a year-by-year look.”
Polikoff said Oregon’s new effort gets some things right. The state deserves credit for putting “student group performance front and center,” he said, not hiding the achievement gaps between white and Asian students and other students of color on a host of metrics, for example. And it clearly allows families to see how their student’s school is faring relative to district and state averages, he said.
But there are also flaws that go beyond even the lack of longitudinal data and cross-comparison functionality, Polikoff said.
“A lot of states give schools an A through an F, or a color score, or offer some way of making sense of whether a school is moving in the right direction,” he said, citing Illinois, Indiana and Tennessee as good examples. Oregon’s new displays include no such indicators.
“I just think a regular person would not really know if a school is improving or not,” using Oregon’s new online report card, Polikoff said.
The Oregon Department of Education releases data throughout the school year, including updated enrollment numbers and graduation rates in the winter and test scores and absenteeism rates in the fall. But the online report cards, despite being intended as a one-stop repository for key data, will only be updated once a year, Farley told reporters this week.
The Oregonian/OregonLive designed its own tool this fall that allows the public to see state testing results over a span of eight years at any school statewide. Find it here.
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