The federal Department of Health and Human Services recently unveiled a new website where one can obtain comparative data on U.S. nursing homes - thousands and thousands of them. Check out http://www.medicare.gov/NHCompare/Home.asp and follow the steps to locate a county, city or state that interests you. It's fascinating. You can get factual information about individual nursing homes. You can also get quality measures (e.g. percentage of patients with "pressure sores") and can compare these with state and national averages. You can learn how many "deficiencies" a nursing home had during its most recent inspection, how serious these were and when (and if) they were corrected. You can determine the average "nursing staff hours per resident per day," and lots more. You can comparison shop - at least begin to narrow the field - in the locale of your choosing. For example: Montgomery County, Ohio has 38 nursing homes in this system. (So, it turns out, does Montgomery County, Maryland.)
If I were hunting for a nursing home for a loved one, this would be an immensely valuable and efficient way to get started. In the end, of course, it won't provide sufficient basis for a complicated decision. Picking a nursing home isn't like ordering a book or shirt via the internet. But how terrific to be able to start by specifying a geographic area and then doing basic investigations of the options without leaving one's desk. Instead of 38 nursing homes to visit, phone or get literature from (some of it advertising hype seeking to persuade rather than inform), I could, via this system, narrow my search to a few alternatives and then get serious about checking them out in all the subjective and objective ways that one wants to when making a difficult selection for someone I care about.
When we turn to K-12 schooling, however, that information paradise is still a considerable distance off. Uncle Sam provides no school-specific information and, it seems safe to wager, many people wouldn't want it to. In the No Child Left Behind act, however, states receiving Title I funding (which is all of them) are obliged to prepare and disseminate annual "report cards" at the school, district and statewide levels. This requirement kicked in with the current school year. At the building level, the district is supposed, at minimum, to provide "information that shows the school's students' achievement on the statewide academic assessments and other indicators of...progress compared to students in the local educational agency and the State as a whole." It may also include other information. Whatever data it furnishes, the district is supposed to disseminate these report cards "to all schools in the school district...and to all parents of students attending those schools in an understandable and uniform format."
Many states and districts were already doing this and more. "School report cards" are not a new idea. But how user-friendly are they? How readily comparable from school to school, to district and to state? To what extent do they truly advance the two large purposes for which they're intended, namely accountability and informed family choices?
It's a mixed picture and, for the most part, not a happy one for parents unless they're sophisticated Internet users and veteran number crunchers. Many of the hard-copy school report cards contain information only about that particular school. They don't supply the basis for informed comparisons with key benchmarks, standards and averages, much less for thoughtful choices among schools.
Parents and educators who can get on the internet and parse data will fare better. Check out your district's or state's offerings and see what you find. Ohio, for example, provides both pre-packaged school-specific report cards (see http://www.ode.state.oh.us/reportcardfiles/2002/BUILD/018119.PDF for a specimen, which happens to be the elementary school I attended in medieval times). It recently added an interactive version by which users can specify the data they want and create their own report cards. (See http://ilrc.ode.state.oh.us/default_real.asp.) Some districts also do their own, and some of these are conscientious and thorough.
System-supplied data typically suffer from two shortcomings, however. One is lack of user-friendliness, transparency, etc. The other is a self-serving tendency to provide the information that the system wants people to have, which isn't necessarily the information they most need when judging school performance or making choices.
But relief is coming. In the past few years, several outfits have emerged as intermediaries, data analysts, packagers and vendors of school information. And they're getting better at it.
The best known of them is "Just for the Kids" (JFTK), which began in Texas and, in partnership with the Education Commission of the States, is rapidly moving into other states. (See http://www.just4kids.org/us/us_home.asp.) Its great strength is taking state test results and interpreting them in ways that are helpful to educators and policy makers. If I were a principal, department head or superintendent, this is where I'd go to see how my students were doing compared with other relevant groups and schools in my state. It's less helpful for parents, though. It doesn't tell you much about the school as such but, rather, about its scores in various grades and subjects and some revealing comparisons with other schools and averages.
The parent-friendly niche is nicely filled by a group called GreatSchools, which does Internet-based school report cards that ordinary laymen can comprehend. They began in California, added Arizona, and are spreading across the landscape as fast as they can. Check out http://www.greatschools.net/. They give you a manageable amount of information about the school itself, as well as its academic results, though the latter are not presented with the sophistication of JFTK. Compare, for example, GreatSchools' handling of (the randomly selected) Ramirez Elementary School in Lubbock, Texas (http://www.greatschools.net/modperl/browse_school/tx/4505) with JFTK'S information for the same school: http://www.just4kids.org/TX/TX_elem_school.asp?campus_name=Ramirez%20El,%20Lubbock%20ISD&campus_id=152901146.
With JFTK and Great Schools focusing on education issues, the School Evaluation Service of Standard & Poors has moved into the "cost-benefit" and "efficiency" territory. As previously noted in the Gadfly (see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=41#606), S & P is doing an ever-better job of assisting Michigan and Pennsylvania policymakers (and sophisticated school leaders and parents) make sense of district-by-district and (in Michigan) school-by-school performance along various gauges, with a particular eye toward the relationship between inputs and results. You can find them on the web at http://ses.standardandpoors.com/. They, too, are seeking to work in more states, and several funders are conspiring to make this happen. A couple of states now want to marry the S & P analysis of school performance with the Just for the Kids analysis of academic achievement. That could be powerful, though again probably a challenge for ordinary parents to navigate.
Then there are providers of systems that enable schools and parents to track THEIR kids' performance every week and relate it to the school's curriculum and the state's academic standards. When aggregated, such data can also help policymakers, but their real strength is in assisting teachers to do a better job and parents to monitor their child's academic progress. My favorite among these offerings is Project Achieve (on whose board I once served), created by the founder of a crackerjack Boston charter school who realized that schools are awash in fugitive information about academic progress yet principals (and teachers) can rarely capture and use it. Have a look at www.projectachieve.com.
The bad news: it's all still confusing and messy, it's patchy (too many states and districts still get by with opaque, self-serving report cards) and, except in a few places, it's still hard for parents to navigate. Today most people will find it far easier to locate a nursing home for an aging relative than to track down the right school for their daughter or son. But the potential is immense, the need is great and, let us hope, the combination of NCLB, capitalist enterprise, philanthropic vision, state envy, and consumer demand will move this along at a rapid pace in the next few years.
