This act that passed in December 2015 gave states more control and responsibility for education decisions, and fundamentally, the law is about using data to meet state education goals. In an October report, the nonprofit advocacy organization Data Quality Campaign laid out what the law requires and how states can do more.
Education departments in states already create public report cards that show how students are doing, but many are difficult to access because they're buried on a website or they aren't easy to understand. The new law requires them to be redesigned, widely accessible and written so that parents can understand them. And states can go further by involving the community in the design process, according to the report.
"States need to prioritize getting this information out in a way that's useful, that's meaningful, that's accessible for the parent that has five minutes of free Internet at the library to make sense of how their child is doing," said Brennan McMahon Parton, associate director of state policy and advocacy for the Data Quality Campaign.
The law requires states to gather a number of new data points, including per-pupil expenditures by school and chronic absence rates. The former reveals where local dollars actually go to help schools serve students well, while chronic absence rates signal how healthy a school is and provides a richer picture than average daily attendance or truancy rates, McMahon Parton said. The campaign suggests that states pull the chronic absence rate data into an early warning system that could alert educators when a student might start struggling.
One of the opportunities that states have is to provide quality, timely data about postsecondary enrollment data when it's available and present it in context with cohort high school graduation rates, retention rates and remediation rates. That will give states a clear picture of how well states are preparing students for college.
"All that info side by side is going to be the most informative to leaders, to communities, to families," McMahon Parton said.
