Two recent national surveys underscore this point and provide sobering data.

A poll of conducted in June by Atomik Research and commissioned by Agency Inc. makes the stakes clear: 65% of parents say they would vote outside their party over education, and 62% said education influenced their vote in the most recent statewide election. Parents are not only paying attention, they are prepared to make education their ballot-box priority.

This sentiment is bipartisan. The same survey found that 67% of Democrats, 67% of Republicans and 70% of independents would cross party lines based on a candidate鈥檚 education stance. At a moment when the nation’s politics feels hopelessly polarized, education is one of the rare issues with the power to realign coalitions.

But what parents are demanding is not more of the same. A July by Brilliant Corners, commissioned by The Freedom to Choose Schools, found that 71% of respondents rated U.S. public schools as fair or poor, and more than half said they were dissatisfied with their 2024 ballot choices. These voters, too often treated as afterthoughts, are sending a message: Give us elected leaders who prioritize our children鈥檚 education, or we will vote for candidates who do.

The data is clear about what worries families most. According to the same poll, 68% said political interference in schools is a bigger threat to quality education than funding gaps or teacher shortages. Black voters in particular are alarmed: 81% cited efforts to erase Black history and bans on diversity, equity and inclusion as major obstacles to a good education.

Parents are not standing still. They are moving their children to new schools, trying homeschooling or seeking tutoring and enrichment to supplement what their schools cannot provide. According to , nearly 1 in 4 parents have switched school types in recent years. This poll, as well as the one commissioned by Agency, reveal that  almost 60% of parents have considered or started homeschooling within the past five years.

At the same time, according to the EdChoice/Morning Consult poll, the appetite for real options is overwhelming: 74% of parents support education savings accounts, 67% favor charter schools and 69% believe in open enrollment across school districts. Families are not asking for one solution; they are demanding the ability to choose what works best for their children.

What does this mean for political leaders? The lesson is simple: Parents are loyal to their kids, not to parties. If neither major party fully represents families鈥� priorities today, the one that presents a bold plan will win their trust and their votes.

There is also a warning embedded in this data. When asked what they would do if the education system doesn鈥檛 improve, Black and Latino parents said their most likely action was not to opt out of public schools, but to vote for candidates who prioritize school reform and equity. In other words, the door is wide open for bold leaders who put forward credible, family-centered education plans.

So far, too many elected officials have focused on the wrong things. Parents are telling us they want schools that are safe, academically strong and respectful of their children鈥檚 identities and histories. They want leaders who expand educational options.

The politics of education are shifting. Parents are frustrated, mobilized and ready to act. The question now is whether political leaders will listen.

If they do, they will find parents ready to support them at the ballot box. 

From cutting social safety net programs and enacting unaccountable voucher programs at the expense of public schools to limiting access to financial aid for higher education, these stormy waters are setting American students adrift, eliminating important protections and creating ever greater barriers to an equitable education that sets young people up for success as adults. 

It鈥檚 more than just money; as Congress and the Trump administration have instituted perilous funding cuts that reduced support for nutrition programs, limited undocumented students鈥� access to important programs and dialed back enforcement of civil rights laws, federal agencies have eliminated and undermined vital data and education research. Without this information, there is no way to know how schools are working to address academic and opportunity disparities 鈥� particularly for Black and Latino students, multilingual learners, students with disabilities and those from low-income backgrounds. 

The U.S. Department of Education by inviting states to seek waivers from the that have, for over two decades, required annual student testing and public, disaggregated reporting of those results. Allowing states to alter established assessment systems and hide data on school quality will leave parents, educators and policymakers without important information they need to help students succeed. 

In order for this to work, the federal government will need partners in states to do the dirty work. Unfortunately, history shows they鈥檒l be amenable. 

At least three states have already begun the formal process of asking for waivers from accountability. 

Oklahoma, which already lowered the bar for proficiency on its state assessments, wants to and replace them with a series of as-yet unidentified tests throughout the year to measure student achievement in language arts and math or the Classic Learning Test, which covers a more limited knowledge base 鈥� primarily the Western and Christian canons 鈥� and has been used primarily for homeschool and private school students. The Oklahoma waiver would also mean the state could stop providing testing accommodations and alternate assessments for students with disabilities and English learners. Together, this would make it impossible to measure the academic progress of all students.

Indiana wants to redirect federal funding away from migrant students, at-risk kids, multilingual learners, children in rural areas and the lowest-performing schools. State leaders also seek to change how they rate schools, in a way that would tell families, advocates, policymakers, and others little because of the proposed methodology.

Like Indiana, Iowa wants the power to redirect federal funds away from underserved student groups. But Iowa goes a step further, asking the department to reinterpret the law to let it stop prioritizing federal funds for schools with the highest poverty levels. Not only would this be overreach by the Department of Education 鈥� legally, it can鈥檛 allow this type of change without congressional approval 鈥� it would change the rules for all states, undermining the objective of Title I to increase financial support for students in high-poverty school districts.

It remains to be seen what other ideas states will cook up under the guise of promoting innovation and reducing administrative burdens, and how those initiatives will endanger students鈥� educational opportunities. But the leaders of 12 states wrote to Washington earlier this year, requesting not only a robust use of federal waiver authority, but a strong deference to state law and a consolidation of federal education funding. 

To be sure, there is a place for federal flexibility. The Education Department in the first Trump administration wisely gave a year鈥檚 reprieve on annual testing when the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools. The Biden administration offered flexibility for Montana to test a new, innovative assessment model, while maintaining civil rights protections. Current federal law already allows states to experiment with innovative assessments and funding, although few states have taken advantage of these initiatives.

This isn鈥檛 some wonky technical issue; annual assessments provide important information that helps parents make educational decisions for their children, teachers to adjust classroom practices and policymakers to craft laws and allocate resources. Strong accountability measures force adults to take a hard look at how schools are serving the most vulnerable students and take action. Targeted funding provides additional opportunities for students from backgrounds long marginalized by America’s education system. 

This waiver program is just one in a series of decisions that is putting students and the country’s future at risk. Ending the collection of this data will limit everyone鈥檚 ability to see the long-term consequences of other harmful policies.   

The Education Department should reconsider its stance on waivers and instead do what鈥檚 right for students: ensure that states remain accountable for improving outcomes. Real students鈥� futures 鈥� and America’s future as a nation 鈥� are at stake.

This question has been at the heart of education policy debates for decades. Federal law requires states to not only look at a school鈥檚 overall results, but to make sure that no group of students is 鈥渓eft behind.鈥� This policy is grounded in a long history of schools giving Black students, Hispanic students and children with disabilities an education that was inferior to that offered to white and non-disabled peers.

But subdividing students in this way hasn’t proven as transformative as federal policymakers might have wished. Over the last decade, for example, scores have been declining overall, but especially for low-performing students. Those trends cross all racial and ethnic groups and apply to differences across income levels, for students with and without disabilities, and for native and non-native English speakers. 

Unfortunately, publicly available data are not well suited to looking specifically at the performance of lower-performing students within schools, so I asked a related one: Are there schools that are doing an excellent job with one group of students while neglecting others? 

To unpack this question, I turned to data from the state of Louisiana. Not only have students there done quite well in recent years, Louisiana is also one of the few states that calculates A-F grades both for overall schools and for individual student groups within those schools.

I started by looking at family income. Could a Louisiana school could somehow earn a high overall rating if its low-income students were not doing well?

The answer is no.

Of course, a perfect apples-to-apples comparison would compare economically disadvantaged students with wealthier peers, not the overall student body. That wasn鈥檛 possible with the publicly available Louisiana data.

Next, I looked at gaps between Black and white kids. The story wasn’t quite as clear as the one around income, but there was only one school that got an F for Black students and an A for white students, and just six schools earned a D for Black students and an A for white students.

Sadly, there were no schools where low-income students earned a higher grade than their more affluent classmates, and only five schools where the Black student group earned a higher grade than their white peers. Statewide, Black students performed worse than white students and low-income students performed worse than wealthier students. But those aggregate totals may suggest different problems than individual schools ignoring some of their students.

Now, this is just one state and one year鈥檚 worth of data, but from the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research came to similar conclusions. It looked at whether districts contributed to academic mobility 鈥� essentially, did students in some districts improve faster than their peers in other districts. After looking at data for nearly 3 million students across seven states, the authors concluded that, 鈥渓ow-performing students experience the largest performance gains when attending districts where students generally excel.鈥�

The lesson for state policymakers is not that they should just trust these generalities and stop collecting disaggregated data. That would be a mistake, since they would never know if within-school gaps did emerge.

Moreover, carefully constructed rules could flag the small subset of schools that do have gaps. For instance, a Louisiana school cannot receive an A grade overall if one of its subgroups is low-performing for two consecutive years. (That caught one school last year with a low-performing English learner subgroup.) Virginia passed an even stronger last year requiring that any school with a low-performing subgroup automatically will have its overall rating downgraded by one level. These are useful back-end checks.

More directly, a handful of states, including Louisiana, Florida and Mississippi, each have accountability systems that give schools points based on the academic growth of their lowest-performing students. Given the national trends where performance has fallen further among these children, more states should consider such measures.

While policymakers can take some heart in knowing that good schools tend to be consistently good across student groups, the flip side is also true: Bad schools tend to be bad for everyone, and state policymakers should focus more on district-level performance issues than within-school gaps.

Ultimately, for school leaders, the priority should be providing a consistently solid education.

Disclosure: Chad Aldeman worked as a consultant for the Virginia Department of Education on the accountability regulations mentioned in the piece. 

But I don鈥檛 want a hotel that excels in only one area. I want every hotel I stay at to have clean sheets and towels, hot water and a quiet environment.

What about schools? Are they more like restaurants or hotels? At the high school level, they might be more like restaurants in that they can offer varieties of experiences that allow students to start to develop specialties. But elementary schools should probably be more like hotels and provide consistently strong services 鈥� and outcomes 鈥� for all kids.

When it comes to the basics of reading and math, how much within-school specialization is there at the elementary levels? That is, are there schools and districts that do a great job of teaching kids to read but maybe aren鈥檛 so good at teaching math?

To find out, I started by looking back at our projects last year identifying districts that did an exceptional job of teaching kids to read by third grade and be proficient in math by eighth grade. Among those positive outliers, I found 140 districts that appeared on both of our lists. That is, these districts were producing outstanding results across subjects and grade levels.

In contrast, we identified 14 districts that were exceptional in one subject but significantly underperformed expectations in the other. Among those, 12 of the 14 were strong in math but weak in reading.

To look at school-level results, I pulled up the 2025 test scores in the state of . Mississippi has some of the best schools in the country, so I figured it would be a good test to see whether they specialized or were consistently strong.

First, I looked to see whether reading scores were correlated with performance in math and science. A correlation of 1.0 would mean the two trends were moving in perfect lockstep, while a correlation of 0.0 would suggest that the two variables were not associated with each other at all. As you can see in the table below, there were very strong correlations across academic subject areas. For example, the correlation across school-level reading and math scores was 0.87, which suggests a very strong relationship. 

These results suggest that schools with high test scores in one content area are very likely to also have high test scores in another subject. (And the opposite.) But that doesn鈥檛 necessarily reflect how much the school contributes to a student鈥檚 scores. It could just be that the school happens to enroll higher- or lower-performing kids.

So, next, I looked at growth rates. In Mississippi, the state using a model called a value table. Essentially, the state created eight performance levels, and schools receive points if they help students advance to higher tiers from one year to the next.

Do schools with high student growth rates tend to see improvement across multiple subject areas? The answer in Mississippi is yes. In the graph below, each dot represents a school that is graphed according to its reading and math growth rates. The closer the dot is to the diagonal line, the closer the relationship between the school鈥檚 growth rates in reading and in math.

Although there are a few outliers on both sides, a 鈥済ood school” tends to be good across subject areas. That is, there are no schools at either the bottom right or top left corners of the graph, where they would be if they were extremely strong in one subject but not the other. For example, among the 50 Mississippi elementary and middle schools that made the greatest gains in reading last year, none of them were below the statewide average in math growth. 

The opposite was also true: Among the 50 schools with the lowest reading score gains, only two reached the statewide average in math.

Florida operates a similar as Mississippi. When I ran their numbers in the same way, I found similar correlations across subject areas.

Both Mississippi and Florida showed strong relationships between a school鈥檚 proficiency and student growth scores. However, that could be a function of the specific way those states have chosen to measure student growth, and it鈥檚 not always the case that a school with high proficiency scores will also have high growth. In fact, because proficiency rates are highly correlated with socioeconomic status, prefer growth measures that attempt to truly isolate a school鈥檚 impact on student learning.

While questions about how best to measure school performance can be thorny and technical, it does seem to be the case that schools that are strong in one subject tend to be strong in others as well. In an increasingly specialized world,  it鈥檚 fortunately rare to find a school that鈥檚 doing a great job in one subject area and letting kids down in the other.

To find out, I looked at 20 years of test results from my home state of Virginia. For simplicity鈥檚 sake, I focused on third grade math results and narrowed my search to schools that had at least 30 test-takers. To control for changes to the underlying tests, I sorted schools into four quartiles, then looked to see if they had moved significantly up or down from their initial category.

As you might expect, schools with high test scores in 2024 also tended to have high scores the year before. Among those in the top 25% of math scores in 2023, 68% remained there in 2024. The same was true at the bottom end, where 76% of schools that fell into the bottom 25% in 2023 placed there again in 2024.

But zoom out a few years, and the results start to become a bit more variable. This should be obvious, but the number of schools that stayed in the exact same category after five years was lower than it was after just one year. The results are the most interesting for schools in either the top or bottom quartile. Among schools that scored in the highest 25% in 2019, 61% were still there in 2024, and 66% of schools in the lowest tier were still there in 2024. But about one-third of the highest-scoring schools had fallen out of the top five years later, and a similar percentage had climbed out of the very bottom. 

What about looking back even further? I ran the same analysis to compare school performance in 2004 versus 2024. It鈥檚 still true that earlier results are predictive of later performance, but the relationship weakens significantly. For example, among schools in the bottom 25% in 2004, 44% were also there in 2024 鈥� but 56% were not. On the other end, 50% of schools in the top quartile in 2004 were still there in 2024 鈥� but that means half were not. In general, you鈥檇 still want to bet on a good school staying good and a bad school staying bad, but you should be much less confident the longer your time horizon.

Virginia started in 1997-98, well before other states were required to do so under the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act. The data for those older years suggest a similar weakening pattern over time. More surprising, there were some schools that looked bad in 1998 that produced some of the highest scores in 2024, and vice versa 鈥� some that looked outstanding in 1998 but had fallen dramatically by 2024.

For example, Virginia’s top elementary school in 1998 was still among the top 10 in 2024. But one that scored at the 99^th percentile in 1998 fell to the 74^th percentile in 2004, the 23^rd in 2019, and all the way to the bottom 10% in 2024. The name on the building stayed the same, but its performance plummeted.

For simplicity鈥檚 sake, I focused this analysis on school-level third grade math scores, and I suspect there would be more consistency if I had looked at district-level results or included more grades.

This discussion is also missing the dynamic effects of school openings and closures. For example, as in my recent analysis of Florida, Virginia had 138 elementary schools that were operating in 1998 but had closed by 2024. These tended to have low test scores. Of the 100 lowest-scoring schools in 1998, 32 were no longer operating in 2024. (Out of the top 100, just three had closed.)

Comparing two years of performance also misses the value that new schools can add. For example, of the 100 highest-scoring schools in 2024, 23 did not exist back in 1998. This combination of closing low-performing schools and opening new ones helped improve Virginia鈥檚 portfolio of public schools.

There鈥檚 also a lesson here for prospective home buyers who might be hoping to purchase a house that will buy them access to a 鈥済ood鈥� local school in perpetuity. That鈥檚 probably a good bet in the short term, but things can also change more than they might expect.聽

Yet virtually every educational aim rests on the same foundation: giving students a strong academic grounding and developing the knowledge and habits of mind that allow them to think critically, communicate effectively and acquire knowledge and skills over time.

At this challenging moment in American education, with student achievement in decline, FutureEd and the Keystone Policy Center decided to approach the question of from scratch. We combed the research about the features of schools that make the greatest contribution to academic achievement and identified five research-based characteristics that together provide a more complete and precise picture of school quality than is typically available. 

All the measures can support school improvement and provide parents and the public with a fuller understanding of school performance. But not all are suitable for high-stakes accountability decisions. Some metrics lack the reliability, validity and comparability necessary for ranking schools, replacing their staff or closing them.

1. Growth in Student Achievement

For decades, accountability systems judged schools based primarily on state test scores. But these correlate strongly with demographics and family income, making it difficult to gauge the real contributions of schools to improved student outcomes. A fairer, and increasingly popular, way to judge schools also considers how much they contribute to growth in students鈥� test scores over the year.

2. Access to Rigorous Instruction

To achieve at high levels, students need access to challenging coursework. Policymakers can address this in accountability systems by measuring whether schools offer access to a broad range of course offerings, including the arts, sciences and technology, so schools don鈥檛 narrow their focus to just reading and math. To help teachers deliver strong instruction, research increasingly points to the importance of using high-quality, standards-aligned instructional materials, which many states and districts are starting to emphasize. Research also has found that completion of one or more advanced math and science classes in high school predicts both college readiness and later health, job satisfaction and well-being. This can be measured by the availability of and enrollment in Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and dual-enrollment programs, for example, but only if they are made accessible to students who may have been shut out in the past.聽

Student surveys also provide insight into whether schools provide a learning environment that promotes high achievement. But any use of surveys should include safeguards against adults influencing responses, and states must ensure they are valid and reliable. That鈥檚 why many states and districts use surveys for school improvement rather than accountability.

Accountability systems also could include reviews of student work, with a focus on instructional rigor, though doing so requires systematically collecting and evaluating work samples across schools.

3. Effective Staff

consistently shows that teacher and principal quality contribute more to student achievement than any other school-based factors. Traditionally, teacher quality has been measured by years of experience and subject-specific expertise, such as degrees earned or passing of teacher-licensure exams. But these measures often don鈥檛 correlate with student achievement. A sounder strategy would be to identify the percentages of effective or highly effective teachers in a school through teacher evaluation systems that use multiple measures of quality and classroom observation, though few states have such systems at scale.聽

States and districts can measure a principal鈥檚 impact on student success using multiple measures and several years鈥� worth of achievement data. Educator surveys of principal-teacher and teacher-to-teacher trust; principals鈥� instructional leadership; and teachers鈥� commitment to their school also provide an important window into a school鈥檚 overall professional capacity. To prevent pressure from influencing survey results, states and districts should limit such measures to school improvement.

4. Supportive Climate

Many states include chronic student absenteeism in their accountability systems as a proxy for student engagement and whether a school’s climate is safe and conducive to learning. It is a reasonable strategy. But well-designed and well-implemented student, teacher and educator surveys 鈥� again, with sufficient validity and reliability safeguards 鈥� can provide more direct measures of school culture. Such surveys also can provide key insights into where improvement is needed.

5. Postsecondary Outcomes

Test scores are proxies for long-term measures that parents value. But metrics such as whether students attend and graduate from college or career-training programs, enroll in the military, find gainful employment, and lead healthy and fulfilling lives are better gauges of readiness for adulthood. Though few states measure outcomes such as college enrollment when evaluating schools, better connecting pre-K-12 data systems to postsecondary and labor market data could help monitor a range of important post-high-school outcomes.聽

Many high-performing countries use inspection systems that combine test scores and other quantitative measures with classroom observations and interviews conducted by teams of trained experts who visit schools to gather information on important features of success. These reviews typically include a school self-assessment followed by team site visits. They result in a comprehensive report describing a school鈥檚 strengths and weaknesses and recommended steps for improvement. While such inspection systems have spread rapidly around the world, the cost and logistics of conducting valid and reliable school site reviews at scale has slowed their adoption in the U.S., particularly for high-stakes accountability decisions.

Test scores matter. But by themselves, they provide an incomplete measure of school success. They also offer little guidance or support on how schools can improve. A more comprehensive set of research-based metrics would provide parents, educators and policymakers with a richer understanding of what makes schools successful and a clearer sense of how to strengthen them. Measurement systems that combine standardized test scores, access to rigorous and advanced coursework, prevalence of effective teachers and school leaders, evaluations of respectful and supportive school cultures and data on student success after high school are most likely to promote higher student achievement. Responsibility for weighting each strand and the specific metrics within them should rest with state and local education officials. But each component should play a role in evaluating school success.

But in recent years, my home state of Indiana has shown that a better approach is possible by tracking and life-outcome metrics such as income and employment five years after high school graduation. 

Indiana Secretary of Education Dr. Katie Jenner should be commended for these efforts, and more states should emulate this approach. That would nudge schools to tailor their work towards helping students build the skills and mindsets to succeed in life, better meeting the interests of families and community. 

How can schools do this effectively at scale?

One model lies in Christel House International, which for years has been measuring success based on our ability to help students from under-resourced backgrounds achieve economic mobility. Our global network includes no-fee private schools in India, Jamaica, Mexico, and South Africa, and in the U.S., both public charters and schools operated in partnership with Indianapolis Public Schools.

A major component of the Christel House model is our College & Careers program. Every Christel House student is paired with a coach starting in high school to help provide mentorship, guidance, and personalized support in preparing for post-high school education and the workforce. Students also gain valuable career exposure and process those experiences with their coaches, helping them better understand their interests and strengths. 

Critically, the coaches remain with students for five years after graduation so they can help troubleshoot the challenges that come with navigating postsecondary education or the working world. And students are guaranteed access to financial support for five years post-graduation to help address unanticipated life events that can derail progress.

Data on our graduates鈥� outcomes affirms that our approach is working. In our home base of Indianapolis, for example, the Indiana Department of Education reported that across our first four graduating cohorts, Christel House Indianapolis alumni are the second highest income-earners on average among public school graduates in the city five years after high school graduation, and they鈥檙e the top income earners among Indianapolis public schools serving a high percentage of students from low-income backgrounds. Globally, 95% of recent Christel House graduates are employed or in school, and 72% of graduates demonstrate upward economic mobility at age 23. 

We arrived at this approach based on our longstanding mission 鈥� established by our founder, entrepreneur Christel DeHaan 鈥� that schools鈥� role should be elevating the life outcomes of students, especially those who are experiencing poverty. Decades ago, our inaugural high school graduates performed well academically, but some of them struggled to successfully transition to life beyond high school. We knew we needed to revise our approach to better support their success, and we have been refining our model ever since. 

We still have room to grow. For example, while our U.S. students鈥� average annual incomes of approximately $37,000 five years after graduation help them achieve livable wages relative to median income in Indiana, we aim to elevate that average so that students who graduate from our schools feel financially secure sooner. A 2023 survey revealed that 76% of Christel House Indianapolis graduates feel comfortable paying their bills each month, but only 43% have savings to cover a large, unexpected expense. 

In efforts to improve education, it鈥檚 critical not to lose sight of our original goal: helping students build a good, successful, and productive life. That鈥檚 why Christel House expanded its College & Careers program into four schools outside of our network for the first time this year, with $1.5 million in public and private funding. More states should put funding behind this outcomes-oriented approach, which would yield a great return on a modest public investment. 

The more we look at data that measures life outcomes, the more we can design interventions that put students鈥� long-term success at the center. That will produce an immense positive outcome for our education system 鈥� and the students who most need our support.

Ensuring schools are excellent has always been at the center of our work at the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. But to meet new demands and expectations. That鈥檚 why NACSA and our partners have been . A few key lessons:

1. Statewide, disaggregated, comparable assessments in literacy and numeracy . These tests are essential to understanding how students are recovering from the pandemic and how taxpayer dollars are being spent. They also ensure that students 鈥� particularly lower-income students, those with disabilities and children of color who have been most impacted by the pandemic 鈥� are learning at accelerated rates. There should also be space for , as long as it produces comparable, disaggregated data that a wide range of stakeholders can use.

2. Families are the most important 鈥� and often forgotten 鈥� element in defining great schools. While assessing family demand and satisfaction, usually measured by school enrollment and parent surveys, is an important factor in school quality, . They should be given the opportunity to articulate what they need schools to do for students, and those perspectives must be central in how school quality is defined.

3. Additional rigorous measures help determine what makes a school great. Schools must equip students to live healthy lives, meet the diverse interests and needs of families and communities, and provide real and clear opportunities for students to pursue their chosen futures. Rigorous measures of quality aligned to a school鈥檚 mission, like enhancing student leadership or strengthening mental health, provide insight into how well schools are delivering for students and communities.

4. Cultural competency matters in defining quality. Deeply valuing family and community perspectives 鈥� especially those from marginalized groups 鈥� has another critical benefit: avoiding culturally incompetent ways of defining quality. While supporting students in developing resilience or self-awareness can be greatly beneficial, how and why a school chooses additional measures needs to be closely examined for . Families and communities can provide essential context on how students may already be succeeding in their day-to-day lives and how those accomplishments could be built into new measures of school quality.

5. Customize, don鈥檛 unilaterally impose, new measures of school quality. It is best to tailor rigorous measures of quality to the individual school, rather than across all schools in a state, district or other jurisdiction. Beware of new, universally applied measures of school quality, such as requiring all schools to administer the same assessment of social-emotional learning and setting the same annual improvement goals for accountability. Student outcomes will look different in different places, and a unilateral measurement may not respond to what families in that community need. 

6. But make sure those custom measures are rigorous. Allowing schools to have different ways of defining quality can contribute to lower standards, or to bad schools finding new ways to avoid consequences. That鈥檚 why new measures must be publicly scrutinized, developed with many key stakeholders and rigorous. New measures should be challenging to achieve, have meaning to stakeholders and be relevant to critical student outcomes. Using of school quality should not be a tool for explaining away low-performing schools.

7. Distinguish measures in a school鈥檚 formal accountability record from results designed to internally drive school or classroom performance. While there is a need for more good ways of knowing how schools are advancing, not every goal or initiative should be a part of a formal accountability plan. There are some interesting frameworks for and about using some measures in a high-stakes context.

8. Education leaders must strengthen how evidence is used and evaluated. In our research and development work with the and the , NACSA learned it鈥檚 hard work to figure out the best sources of evidence to demonstrate progress (or not). For example, a school that has a mission of enhancing student agency and defines it in a culturally appropriate way may find an off-the-shelf assessment to evaluate how well it is achieving that goal. But more likely, the school or authorizer will need to design its own valid and reliable data collection method. Stakeholders need to understand what evidence the school has and/or can collect and be skilled in determining the quality of that evidence and subsequent evaluations of success. Community partners, assessment experts and cross-school collaboration can be helpful partners here.

9. Oversight bodies, schools and families need to understand how school quality information will be used. This avoids 鈥済otcha鈥� scenarios, which force schools to spend unneeded time responding to non-performance compliance issues at the expense of teaching and learning. When school underperformance is clear and intervention is needed, it shouldn鈥檛 come as a surprise to the school or families. Well-structured performance contracts, a calendar of reporting requirements and clear distinctions between issues that trigger oversight body action and those that will not can go a long way to maximize time spent on teaching and learning.

10. Great education leaders make information public and easy to understand. Providing public access to student performance, student and staff backgrounds, performance frameworks, accountability reports, financial performance and school initiatives, for example, is best practice and something Such information can be one source families use to make nuanced and important judgments about what school is best for their child’s unique aspirations and needs.

The work of evolving definitions of excellence in schools is complex and nuanced, but the opportunities to meet the needs of communities and students are great. While there remains much learning and work to do, NACSA is committed to expanding the possibilities for great, high-quality, innovative schools that communities are demanding now more than ever.

The answer is two-fold. First, it鈥檚 important to know we are not going to give parents information that doesn鈥檛 help them, or only helps some of them. Second, we have been consistently adding new data, but its type and source may surprise you.

Omitting new assessment data 鈥� for now 

The cancellation of standardized testing in 2020 and the partial resumption in 2021 has produced two years of nonexistent or, at best, incomplete data. In collecting data from all 51 state education agencies, we鈥檝e found that student participation levels differ widely, ranging from 97% in Mississippi to just 23% in California. 

Importantly, even in states with 鈥渉igh鈥� participation rates, we do not know which student groups are represented. History tells us the highest-need students often disappear from these data first 鈥� and they are also the ones who have from pandemic learning disruptions.

Without disaggregation, it is impossible to discern which student groups are under- or unrepresented in a given data set, challenging our ability to present an accurate view on how schools are serving all students. Using incomplete data sets to update our school quality ratings would be like trying to make a recipe with only a partial ingredient list.

This, combined with the concerns we鈥檝e heard from many of our research partners, is why we are excluding 2020 and 2021 assessment data from our GreatSchools ratings. In most states, this means that parents will continue to see test data from 2019 on their school profiles until we can obtain and display 2022 assessment data. Each state鈥檚 timeline and data publication process is unique, but we hope to receive this data and make it available to parents nationwide on our profiles by the end of this year.  

Although we are working to collect and display this 2022 assessment data as soon as we can get it from states, we also know that parents can鈥檛 wait. They need recent, relevant school information now. For families, parsing through years of school data isn鈥檛 an academic exercise 鈥� it鈥檚 a matter of their child鈥檚 education and well-being. According to the , more than a third of K-12 parents are concerned about how schools are supporting students鈥� learning and their social-emotional and mental health needs amid the ongoing pandemic. 

Parents need timely, robust school information now more than ever, and we have committed to finding and sharing it from several new sources.

Advancing a broader view of school quality 

Data acquisition challenges aside, we know that . Painting a rich picture of school quality includes sharing information on the resources schools have to offer, the practices they employ to support all students, as well as the outcomes the school is achieving and whether all of these things are equitably distributed. 

Even before the pandemic struck, GreatSchools has been collecting and sharing new, relevant school information with parents that goes beyond test scores. We remain committed to presenting families with a more holistic view of school quality by:

• Sharing new data types. School quality is reflected by more than just assessment data. Components of a school鈥檚 culture, such as trust and commitment, to student success. We鈥檝e already added this 鈥渟chool climate鈥� data to GreatSchools profiles in Illinois and New York City. Building upon what we鈥檝e learned, we are now preparing to display climate data in five more states in the coming months. By connecting more parents with this valuable, new type of school quality information, we hope more states will see the benefit of making this data accessible for families.

• Leveraging partnerships to improve data access. High schools with strong college outcomes often to advanced course offerings. To help parents discover schools that offer such classes, we鈥檙e partnering with national organizations that share our commitment to ensuring parents have equitable access to this information. Starting this week, parents will be able to browse high schools鈥� advanced course offerings on GreatSchools profiles and explore for their child鈥檚 success.

• Spotlighting best practices for college success. In 2021, we with our annual College Success Award, which offers parents a snapshot of whether high schools prepare students to enroll in college, succeed with college-level coursework, and persist into their second year. In 2022, we launched our bilingual collection to highlight for educators and parents how College Success Award-winners are innovating to create more equitable and effective experiences for their students. The two-year project began with a thorough landscape analysis; consultation with school design experts; interviews with experts, parents, and educators; and a data analysis on schools with outsized success among low-income students. 

• Improving opportunities for school leaders to share information. Who better to share what makes a school great than the dedicated leaders that walk its halls each day? School leaders can of their school, then add information about practices, policies and courses to their GreatSchools profile. This newly revamped feature allows leaders to connect directly with current and prospective parents and provide additional context beyond quantitative data, from band to world languages to extracurriculars and more.

• Elevating the voices of historically marginalized families. The Community Reviews section of our school profiles allows parents, students, faculty and community members to share their school experiences with others. We鈥檝e recently improved our to better support parents of diverse backgrounds in sharing their story. In the past three months alone, nearly 10,000 parents and community members added new reviews to school profiles, reflecting upon school safety, learning, social-emotional well-being and more so families of similar identities can understand how the school will support their child.

A call to action for state education agencies

As noted, we are actively working with states to collect 2022 assessment data and look forward to displaying that on our profiles when it becomes available. In the meantime, we urge states to join our efforts to connect parents with the rich school quality information they want and deserve. To do this, state education agencies must:

• Disaggregate data sets. Giving families access to rich, disaggregated data builds knowledge, expands thinking and strengthens positive communication among families, educators and schools. A recent Data Quality Campaign shows that only 28 states disaggregate data by student groups in their state report cards (and six states that previously did have now removed it). The effects of disrupted learning were not evenly distributed and parents deserve to know who is being left behind.
  
• Calculate growth. Even without consistent assessment data from 2020 and 2021, states can 鈥� and should 鈥� . There is no reason why 2019 and 2022 data cannot be used to quantify how well schools have supported students the past few years. If we only look at students鈥� current achievement levels, we will not get a clear understanding of how schools are truly serving their students, particularly children of color. This is why growth is now key to our GreatSchools ratings, and why we continue to advocate for states to gather (and disaggregate) this data to provide a more nuanced lens on school quality.

• Prioritize school climate data. School climate data helps parents understand important aspects of their child鈥檚 learning environment, such as leadership, collaboration among teachers, instructional rigor, family engagement and student social-emotional support. Although the pandemic disrupted the collection of this information, it鈥檚 coming back much quicker than assessment data. However, many states still don鈥檛 collect or report climate data, others do so voluntarily by districts, and some share it only at the district or state level. Every school in the country should have a climate survey and parents should be able to see the results. States can make this happen. 

Combining reliable and valid outcomes data 鈥� particularly data rooted in equity 鈥� and new information about climate, school practices and parent perspectives will give parents more of what they need to obtain a better picture of school quality today. As the ancient proverb goes, 鈥渘ecessity is the mother of invention.鈥� Though the pandemic complicated our usual ways of assessing school quality, it has also created opportunities to find new ways of understanding how well schools are serving their students. 

Parents need accurate and equitable school information now. With a bit of creativity and dedication, together we can find it.