State’s website that tracks schools’ progress gets makeover

Redesign aims to make data more accessible



DESIGN—Students’ performance can be tracked on the updated Dashboard website.

DESIGN—Students’ performance can be tracked on the updated Dashboard website.

Little more than a year after its debut, the California School Dashboard—a state Department of Education website that allows parents to track how schools and districts are faring in such key performance areas as test scores and graduation rates—is getting a new look: Pie charts are out, gauges are in.

But that’s not all: When the Dashboard is updated in December with new data, it will also be translated into Spanish. It’ll have a new name too: Dashboard 2.0.

“The redesign of the Dashboard is to make it simpler to use and easier to understand,” California Department of Education spokesperson Scott Roark told the Acorn on Monday.

The Dashboard currently uses pie charts. Divided into slices, the charts show how well a school is doing in a number of academic “indicators” such as graduation and suspension rates. Schools received one of nine color-coded pie charts for each indicator.

From highest to lowest, the five performance levels are blue, green, yellow, orange and red.

The revised Dashboard, which is designed to be more parentfriendly, keeps the color coding but uses gauges, with an arrow pointing to the corresponding color. An arrow pointing to red indicates the lowest performance while one pointing toward blue stands for highest performance.

State educators developed the Dashboard to replace the Academic Performance Index, which California had used since 1999 to measure individual school progress. The API, which used standardized tests to come up with a single score for each school, was suspended in 2015.

Unlike the flat results of the API, the Dashboard provides parents with “many different measures of a school’s performance— where it’s strong, where it needs to improve, how it’s doing over time,” Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson said in a 2017 news release.

Parents can look up student performance at a school site and compare the results with statelevel data, according to Roark.

Although the Dashboard provides a much better way for parents to evaluate their school and compare it to a statewide standard, the website also makes it “all but impossible” to compare individual schools to one another, according to researchers at USC who assessed the Dashboard after its first year.

Calling it a “bold experiment,” the researchers said the Dashboard moves California “sharply away from rankings, grades and punishments” and toward a “continuous improvement approach to addressing low-performing schools.”

“Whether the experiment will work is an important question for future researchers,” the study concluded. “For now, there are promising signs, but also areas where the state could shore up the Dashboard with little effort.”

On the redesigned website, schools are still measured on how they performed on the nine academic indicators. Local districts are responsible for providing data on four of the performance indicators: basic services and school condition, implementing state academic standards, parent engagement, and school climate.

For the 2018 Dashboard, districts have until Nov. 16 to upload their data to the website showing how schools did in the performance indicators.

When state education officials released the first Dashboard in March 2017, officials described it as “a work in progress” subject to changes and improvements.

“It will be a far more valuable tool one year from now and three years from now than it is today as . . . feedback is incorporated and as improvements are made,” state Board of Education President Michael W. Kirst said in a March 2017 news release.

Dashboard 2.0 is “friendlier, simpler to use and easier to understand,” according to the state education department’s website. The new design also has 80 percent fewer “pages.”

“It even looks better on a smartphone screen,” according to the website.