Giving Compass' Take:

• Under  ESSA, schools now produce a more understandable report card. That paired with a student's report card should paint a fuller, more accurate picture of school performance for parents.  

• How will these report cards help families better understand the relationship between school performance and student achievement?

• Read about how school performance can vary within city school districts. 

A handful of visionary state leaders in education are doing something unprecedented — prioritizing parents. It is not a minute too soon. Parents currently receive limited, piecemeal, hard-to-understand information on both how their school is performing and how their child is achieving.

When parents think their school is good and their child is fine academically, they focus their time and energy on other pressing issues. But in most places, there is a Grand Canyon-size gap between what parents are told about their children’s learning and what the school knows to be true.

The issue is not a lack of information. Superintendents and principals have a multitude of diagnostics, such as Lexile, Quartile and MAP, that can be compared and contrasted to tell them exactly how each student is performing in math, English and, in many cases, science and social studies.

As important as student report cards are, in isolation, they cannot tell the whole story. Nonetheless, parents rely on them almost exclusively.

Compounding the problem is the slew of negativity around state assessments. Although these tests are a more accurate measure of grade-level performance in most states, and can provide valuable context for families, parents do not trust them as much as they do student report cards.

But there is good news, and a path forward. Five states have embraced the new federal requirement under the Every Student Succeeds Act to create easily understood school report cards as an opportunity to give parents complete, usable information about their child’s school. Awareness is the first step toward advocacy, and there is no better advocate for a child than his or her parent.

In our most recent report, Going Beyond Good Grades, Learning Heroes took a deep dive into which data points, when combined with student report cards, would cause parents to re-evaluate their child’s academic performance.

Read the full article about school report cards by Cindi Williams at The 74.