How to Read a School Report Card Without Being Misled

When comparing schools, nothing is more deceptive than trusting a single overall grade in a state or district report card. Education agencies are required to publish a range of metrics that often send mixed messages about school quality's tradeoffs.

Proficiency is not growth

The most important distinction to make is between test proficiency and student growth. Schools can post high proficiency rates from tests of reading, math, and science skills when many students are already scoring in the top tiers. Under federal law, report cards must show the percentage of students at each achievement level, including "basic", "proficient", and "advanced".

But proficiency alone is not a clue to a school's results. Federal education requirements for report cards include "an academic progress indicator", which is often year-over-year growth. To know if a school is improving outcomes, look at the bottom-line trend in those growth measures. Without it, a school could still be the same institutions it was years ago.

The grade can hide subgroups

Another essential difference between one overall grade and the underlying data is how the longer-term goals and subgroup progress are reported. Among the multiple indicators of success, federal requirements include "the academic progress of children from major racial and ethnic groups, children from economically disadvantaged families, children with disabilities, and children with limited English proficiency". Look in the federal card for progress on these disaggregated groups, even while the headline number may be impressive for the student body as a whole.

Attendance and graduation are separate alarms

Reading state and district report cards must include looking at chronic absenteeism and school dropout data. Schools with high overall grades may still fall short. Federal education guidelines require these figures to appear.

For graduates, another set of numbers to know is the data by which cohorts of high-schoolers complete their work. Public report cards must share "graduation rates, including four-year adjusted, five-year adjusted, and cohort (unadjusted) graduation rates, as applicable, and the performance of students in understanding graduation requirements". These data sets show how common it is for students in a grade to finish with that cohort, and to avoid longer timelines or graduation-requirement changes that add to dropout risk.

Staffing and spending change the picture

Any school's most direct signal of what teachers know is their collective experience, regardless of the official name on the building. Federal guidelines require report cards to drill down to each school for student-to-teacher and student-to-administrator ratios, and for "the average years of experience of professional staff and the percentage of professional staff with advanced degrees". Alongside test and growth data, parents can check on how much in-school experience and training is possible for their children. They can see this variance from school to school, accounting for understaffing or excessive administrative work.

Report cards also identify how much funding is brought to each school, and how much staffing is required to deliver programs. Federal requirements demand expenditure data for each school, organized in ways that parents and administrators should find useful.

What the report card cannot tell you

Read the report cards this way: as the set of outcomes that matter most to you, alongside the state, federal, and local accountability goals. Statements like these have yet to be specifically verified by the U.S. Education Department or other primary source, and are best read as a parent's editorial interpretation of the data sets in joint.

How to use the numbers

The best rule of thumb: read growth first, then subgroup gaps, then attendance, then graduation, then staffing and spending. Together, that order will show the most important things to watch for an advanced school. Where growth holds, with strong subgroups, strong school attendance, strong graduation, and an adequate staff, a better school is more likely to be found. The overall school-year grade is important, but it cannot convey everything you need to know.

If your state's report card is in somewhere, the best advice is to follow those figures in exactly that order, checking one year to another year.