Parents Gain New Online Access to Important
School Performance Data
Parents in Arizona,
Arkansas and North Carolina can now easily review online
detailed school performance data for every school in their
state to determine how their child’s
school compares to other schools and whether they need to take
action to improve their school. The School Information Partnership
(SIP) announced that student achievement data from all public
schools in Arkansas, Arizona and North Carolina are now available
online at www.SchoolResults.org.
SIP is an unprecedented
public-private initiative between The Broad Foundation and
the U.S. Department of Education. SIP’s goal is to improve dramatically the general public’s
access to easy-to-understand information about public schools,
districts and state academic achievement results. SIP is focused
on: Giving parents powerful and comparable information about
the performance and demographic makeup of their children’s
schools, as well as other schools and districts across their
state; Providing educators useful tools to diagnose areas that
need improvement and identify other schools from which to learn
effective practices; Empowering state and local policymakers
with comparative tools and benchmarks to monitor the relative
progress of their state’s schools and districts in order
to make better informed policy decisions; and Reporting to
members of the media critical data to help inform their readers
about their local schools and the progress they are making
under No Child Left Behind.
“It is exciting to provide this country
a truly powerful resource for everyone who wants to know how
their school is doing and whether education is improving,” said
Mr. Eli Broad, founder of The Broad Foundation. “Now,
thanks to the School Information Partnership, people in more
than 20 percent of the country can easily access the data that
will help them make informed decisions to improve student achievement.”
U.S. Secretary of Education
Rod Paige said, “Parents,
educators and taxpayers will benefit. The web site helps policymakers
understand and monitor the progress of the state’s education
systems. It enables educators to identify schools with high
achievement and focus on the reasons for such achievement.
It also helps them focus resources for the schools that need
them. Parents can use the tools on the web site to compare
their children’s school to neighboring schools or others
across the state. Taxpayers can see what their hard-earned
money purchases. This is democracy in action, working best
with the free flow of public data.”#
