Mark Twain famously said that there are three kinds of falsehoods: “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” We need to add a fourth to that list: state-issued report cards on schools. Drafted with good intentions, these accountability measures have been redrafted into glorified district propaganda and are in need of not just reformation, but a complete restructuring.
In my hometown of Milwaukee, for instance, Jackson Elementary received three out of five stars from the state for the 2023–2024 school year, earning the designation “Meets Expectations”—all well and good. But at this three-star school, only 5.7 percent of their students can read and only 4.3 percent can perform math at grade level. In fact, 22 Milwaukee elementary schools have a “Meets Expectations” rating, even though fewer than a quarter of their students are proficient in reading and math.
Similar discrepancies exist in so-called “high-achieving” schools, too. Craig Montessori School received a rating of “Exceeds Expectations,” but its reading and math proficiency rates are 20 and 12.9 percent, respectively. Only seven out of the 19 schools that “exceed expectations” in Milwaukee have a proficiency rate over 40 percent. That means a high-achieving school, according to the state, is a school where the majority of students are behind grade-level.
Let’s be blunt: Such report cards are tantamount to lies. Most parents don’t parse through the state analytics and value-added growth models to discern the quality of their child’s school. They hear the principal tout their school’s four-star rating or see a banner over the classroom door reading “Exceeds Expectations” and trust they’re getting an honest account of what’s happening inside. It’s not just a technical issue of scoring rubrics but a breach of public trust that stymies our ability to address real issues in our schools.
While school report cards were a hot topic in 2015, when the Every Student Succeeds Act required states to craft them, they have since become an ancillary issue—overshadowed by Covid closures, culture debates over critical race theory and gender theory, and the popularity of education savings accounts. That is until Mike Petrilli resurfaced the debate in his newsletter, which spilled into a spirited debate on X.
Mike is right to raise the issue. While No Child Left Behind is every one’s favorite piñata to thwack, there’s a small but not insignificant body of evidence suggesting that, over the decade and a half after NCLB, states with stronger accountability measures saw greater achievement growth. Standards, accountability, and testing do indeed work. Moreover, even as school choice becomes the modus operandi for school funding in many states, any market requires sufficient information to function. School choosers (parents) need to know something about what it is that they are choosing.
The crux of the debate centers on whether states should prioritize growth or achievement. Achievement alone is a poor measure of school quality, since a student’s background so heavily impacts their academic achievement. But regardless of a student’s background or the cause of their lagging scores, it’s duplicitous to label the schools from Milwaukee as “exceeding expectations” when they do no such thing.
Many states have opted to mix the two into a single score, which muddles the information. Craft a convoluted sliding scale and throw in other factors—such as graduation and attendance rates, which are easy to game—as Wisconsin does, and you get a school with a near-zero achievement rate that can boast a “Meets Expectations” moniker.
What if instead of toggling around the edges of the scoring systems, we restructured it all together?
There are now numerous private organizations such as Great Schools and Niche that provide assessments of schools akin to the report card system. When I was looking for teaching jobs, I relied on these websites to provide me a sense of the school, knowing that report cards in my state had become a “trophy for everyone” kind of affair. Niche and Great Schools provide a far harsher and more realistic assessment than the state ever could or would. The incentives for painting a rosy picture, for policymakers and administrators alike, will always pull towards leniency, whereas private organizations need to provide an accurate picture for users to return and trust them.
The state still plays a role. They have access to scores of data which would be helpful for the public to have. State agencies could forgo the overall ranking—leave that to the private companies, which will do it more honestly—to instead make state report cards a simple dashboard of data about achievement, growth, absenteeism, and graduation rates. Growth scores are harder to manage in this system, as it requires student-level data that cannot be posted, but schools could make public the percentage of students that showed less than, at least, or well over grade-level growth per year.
This change would also help the carrot and stick accountability aspects of standards-based reform. Instead of mandating state intervention if a school drops to an “F” or “Fails to Meet Expectations”—a ranking which few schools ever receive, however deserving—policymakers should base the trigger for these interventions solely on data, which are harder to fudge.
It is certainly still possible to jigger growth and achievement cutoff scores, making it easier for a student to reach “proficient,” but that exists in the current system anyways. Posting raw data, instead of working them into a final grade, reduces the opportunities for massaging the final information into an overly optimistic picture.
If state legislators don’t improve the report cards, an increased reliance on alternative raters may be the natural result either way.
To improve schools, policymakers, researchers, parents, and the community more broadly need honest information. What’s working? Who’s succeeding? What’s failing? To answer these questions, we need clear communication and honest data. State report cards themselves fail these tests, and it’s time for intervention.
