« Be My Guest | Main | The Demographic Bulge and BA Attainment »
Paradise by the Dashboard Light
What does the dashboard include? Demographics, percentage of schools by state making AYP and in restructuring, NCLB funding, percentage of teachers that are highly qualified in low and high poverty schools, percentage of students proficient by subgroup on the state test and NAEP, graduation rates, percentage of students taking AP exams, and the percentage of students using tutoring and choice options. Check out your state at the link above.
I think you're too kind, eduwonkette. (Hey, I'm supposed to be the one who's impressed by new and shiny toys, not you!) Dashboards are good at summarizing a lot of complex information, but they leave a lot out that may be relevant. For example, test scores have standard errors, and differences that appear to be important visually may not be statistically significant when those standard errors are taken into account. This is a problem with the charts displaying NAEP achievement trend data.
Also, the data are only as good as their source. I'm particularly miffed at the inclusion of the percentage of high school students in the class of 2006 taking advanced placement exams, which is drawn from College Board reports. The denominator for this percentage is an estimate of the number of high school graduates in the state (and nation) from a set of projections produced in 2003 by the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education -- not the actual number of high school graduates in 2006. That's sloppy even by skoolboy's lax standards.