Disclosing School Performance to Improve Public Education
Many states enacted school report card requirements in the mid-1980s as concern about the inadequacies of public education mounted.
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In 1983 A Nation at Risk, a report commissioned by President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education, Ter rell Bell, warned that American public education often was mediocre compared to that of other countries.
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In a study of students’ performance in twenty-two countries, U.S . students placed twelfth. SAT scores, too, had declined in the 1960s and early 1970s. Press coverage of discipline and drug problems also suggested the need for better school accountability. Education was the largest single item in most state budgets, and candidates featured education issues prominently in state election campaigns in the 1980s.
State and local officials saw school report cards as one way to provide parents with greater choice and to put pressure on school administrators to improve performance. Report cards could work in tandem with other novel approaches that states were experimenting with – vouchers to pay for private schools, charter schools, and performance contracting, a form of financing that allowed schools to design educational programs and secure resources in exchange for agreements to achieve certain performance outcomes. Report cards could reward schools for meeting their performance targets. 206
In an effort to spread the innovative practices of a few states, Congress required in 1994 that all states establish school performance standards and test students to assess whether they met these standards. 207 Congress also required educational agencies receiving funding under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to “publicize and disseminate to teachers and other staff, parents, students, and the community” the results of annual performance reviews. 208
The content, presentation, and means of disseminating information in school report cards continued to vary widely from state to state, however. According to a national study by Education Week in 1999, only thirty-six states published regular report cards on individual schools. 209 Most presented information on schools’ past test scores and on state averages. Reporting on other aspects of performance – school safety, class size, and faculty qualifications – was less common. Only a quarter of the states with report cards presented information that allowed comparisons among test scores of schools with similar student demographics. Some states distributed school report cards to students, while most made them available on the Internet.
One major problem was the lack of consensus about the kinds of data that school report cards should contain to measure performance. Surveys conducted in 1998 found that parents and educators sometimes had quite different views regarding important content, and that existing school report cards did not alw ays co ntain information that both regarded as very important. Educators were more likely to want demographic and disaggregated data, while some parents were concerned that such data would be divisive. Only about a third of those polled thought that schools should be judged principally on student achievement on standardized tests. Most regarded indicators of teacher quality and school climate as among the critical data to include. 210
In addition, some early research suggested that surprisingly few parents and educators made use of report card information. Research by Public Agenda conducted in 1999 found that only 52 percent of teachers and 31 percent of parents had seen a school report card. 211
In 2001, the George W. Bush administration championed the No Child Left Behind Act as a centerpiece of public eduction reform. Among other provisions, the law required
