School data, all at your fingertips
State website gathers information
Intelligencer Journal
Lancaster New Era
Updated Apr 01, 2011 22:37
By BRIAN WALLACE, Staff Writer
Gov. Tom Corbett wants the state to implement a ratings system that assesses how well public schools educate their students and spend taxpayers' money.
The "A to F" grading system he envisions isn't in place yet, but the state Department of Education this week took a step in that direction by adding a link on its website titled "How is my school doing?"
The link on the home page www.pde.state.pa.us includes data on standardized test scores, graduation, dropout and attendance rates and student progress reports for all 500 public school districts in the state.
It also provides links to contact information and websites for every public school in the state.
Ron Tomalis, the acting education secretary, requested the changes as the state transitions to a more user-friendly school-rating system.
"This is transparency. It's letting the parent and the taxpayers know how well our schools are doing in one easy stop," Tomalis said.
Tomalis is moving to Pennsylvania from Maryland and, like other parents, he wanted to compare school districts as he considered where to live, but the information wasn't readily accessible.
"All parents should have access to this data," he said.
The links don't provide any new information, but they do consolidate data that was previously strewn throughout the department's website, accessible only through a detailed, and cumbersome, search.
While not comprehensive, the links provide a lot of information that parents and other taxpayers curious about their local schools might find helpful.
A person searching for data on, say, Ephrata High School, would learn that the school made AYP ("adequate yearly progress") based on its students' PSSA scores in math and reading in 2010 but fell short of the AYP standard in 2009.
Data on how much academic growth students made in a year also is available through a link to the Pennsylvania Value-Added Assessment System (PVAAS) website.
That site indicates Ephrata High earned a green rating ("above predicted achievement") in math and was the top-rated school in Lancaster County and among the top 5 percent of high schools in the state.
In reading, it didn't fare as well, earning a yellow rating ("met predicted achievement"), but the school still ranked second in the county and was among the top one-third in the state.
Some of the databases are much more user-friendly than others.
The PVAAS and AYP sites, for instance, provide multiple options for comparing schools and different groups of students and assessing changes from year to year. Most of the others links, though, are simply to charts of numbers with few options for comparing data or breaking it down.
In addition, some databases use education jargon the general public might not understand. For instance, districts are sometimes referred to as LEAs (local educational agencies). Attendance is listed as ADA (average daily attendance), while enrollment is ADM (average daily membership).
Nonetheless, the links are a start toward a more transparent and user-friendly system, Tomalis said.
The education department will clean up some of the wording and add more data, including information on school expenditures, in the coming months, he said.
Tomalis expects the state to implement a new school-ratings system within a year.
bwallace@lnpnews.com
Read more: http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/369516#ixzz1JSLbQ37g
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