By Lauren Vertrees
When educators, parents and community members have a complete picture of school quality, they are empowered to make decisions that are best for students, teachers and families.
States are committed to creating transparency within their accountability systems and are working to improve state and school-based report cards. Louisiana is one state leading in the development and implementation of their report cards.
CCSSO recently released A School Finder to Empower: Case Study of Louisiana’s New School Report Card, to highlight examples of best practice strategies the state education agency implemented as they developed reporting tools that would meet the needs of their stakeholders as well as their lessons learned from the experience.
Some of the unique features of Louisiana’s reporting tools include:
- Integration of ratings for early childhood programs and centers
- Creation of a public site, School Finder, to engage parents and community members
- Creation of a secure site, Louisiana Principal and Superintendent Secure Reporting Portal, for school and system leaders
- Considerable stakeholder engagement strategies
- Broad and strategic communication plan to ensure use of systems by all stakeholders
The Louisiana team partnered with technical experts as well as two other states (Michigan and Nevada), to present their reporting tool during the CCSSO Report Card Case Study Webinar on March 27, 2018. The recording of that webinar can be found here.
Louisiana is a great model for other states that are currently developing or improving their reporting tools. The degree of transparency established through these tools emphasizes the importance of building a community of informed consumers of K-12 education in order to help schools and students improve.
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