Alabama State Department of Education officials appeared to have turned their homework in at the last moment possible, meeting deadlines to post federal report card data online by the end of 2017.
On Friday evening, the state turned on its new online dashboard system that provides the federal data and allows parents and educators to look at the data for individual systems and, for the first time ever, compare schools.
As a bonus, 2016-2017 ACT Aspire scores are included on the report cards. According to those scores, students statewide generally improved in all three subject areas: reading, math, and science, though the increases were small and reading scores showed mixed results.
Students in third through eighth grades and also in tenth grade were tested in math and reading. Students in fifth, seventh, and tenth grades were tested in science.
This is the final year of ACT Aspire results, as the state board of education voted to end the contract with ACT in June. No permanent replacement has been found, but state officials are beginning work to decide whether to create an Alabama-specific test or go with an off-the-shelf test.
Students with disabilities and those with limited English proficiency still have the overall lowest proficiency levels, and Asian students still outperform all other ethnicities.
Statewide, girls outperformed boys on the ACT Aspire in all subjects.
What the dashboard shows
Here are some points to consider about federal requirements and what Alabama officials are sharing on the new dashboard.
First, federally-imposed regulations on schools typically address struggles faced by historically marginalized students and attempt to call attention to and help remedy those inequities.
Second, federal law requires this data to be shared with the public. Alabama had its hand slapped for not providing this data in recent years, and this dashboard is the result of that hand-slapping. Other states have been providing this information for years. Here's Pennsylvania's, for example.
Third, this is not part of the state report card data that will be released in February, but this dashboard system forms the foundation for how that state report card data will be shared with the public, according to state officials. All required information, state and federal, will be housed in the new dashboard, state officials have said.
As far as how to use the dashboard, two overall options are offered: choose the state or any school district as a whole, or narrow down results by school.
There is a glossary of terms used in the dashboard on the Education Report Card's home page.
Here's the information accessible on the dashboard:
Oh, and there's a link to the National Assessment of Educational Progress web site, too. Alabama's students have recently landed at the bottom of all states for fourth and eighth grade math. Reading scores are a bit better, but still not above national averages.
Here's a screenshot of the dashboard.
Results for all tested grades are lumped together, so no grade-specific results are provided, which is different than in previous years.
Officials also didn't provide any way to download the whole state's data, so at this point, there's no way to find the unexpected high-performers, nor which schools may find themselves on the "failing" school list using Alabama Accountability Act rules. (Even Texas gives you the data, y'all.)
Also, there is no way to compare across subgroup status (as AL.com provided in the earlier ACT Aspire result charts). For example, there is no way to view, side-by-side, proficiency levels of white, Hispanic, black, and students in special education as in years past. (The charts above were created by typing the numbers into a spreadsheet.) Comparisons are only made within a specific subgroup, which mask achievement gaps between subgroups.
For the first time ever, test results could be broken down by race and subgroup status, for example, to show proficiency results for black students who also have a disability, or Hispanic students who also have limited English proficiency, or white students who are also poor.
Those breakdowns revealed some hard truths about which children are struggling the most to achieve proficiency in Alabama's public schools.
New information about students in poverty
Another never-revealed-before set of data is the ability to find which subgroup of students are eligible for free or reduced-price meals, a proxy for poverty.
In years past, the public was told what percentage of students were eligible, but not the race and ethnicity and disability status of the student.
For example, statewide, for the 2016-2017 school year, 66 percent of all students in Alabama were in poverty, but more than 77 percent of students with disabilities are in poverty.
When broken down further by race, 89 percent of black students are in poverty, whereas only 49 percent of white students are in poverty. 87 percent of Hispanic students are in poverty.
Looking at proficiency levels using those multiple parameters is even more eye-opening.
Comparing schools and systems
There is a feature to compare proficiency levels of students in up to four schools or systems, narrowing down by race, subgroup, and gender. Those choices are found at the top of the dashboard after clicking "Compare Schools."
So, for example, here's a screenshot of the dashboard of proficiency levels of all students at the state level, and in three districts: Mountain Brook City, Hoover City, and Madison City.
Take the comparison a step further, narrowing down to white students with disabilities, and here's what that looks like.
Now look at the proficiency levels in those same districts among black students in special education, and this is what that looks like. "N/A" means there are fewer than 10 students in the subgroup.
While the gaps between white and black students in special education are remarkable, experts say results across districts and schools are most useful when officials at schools where students are scoring at the low end take the time to find out what districts whose students are scoring at the high end are doing in order to better support those students in their learning.
The differences are stark, too, when making comparisons of schools within the same district.
Take, for example, three elementary schools in Jefferson County. The statewide proficiency levels are on the far left in the screenshot below.
The differences among schools is wide.
Final comparison. Here's a look at proficiency levels among black students in, from left to right, the whole state, Pike County, Montgomery County, and Macon County. All three districts have high levels of poverty, so what accounts for the higher achievement among black students in Pike County?
Though this data is far from complete, and still fairly cumbersome, the dashboard approach is a far cry from the 1,100-plus pages of data in PDFs that was published for the 2014-2015 school year. That data was nearly useless to the average parent or educator trying to determine what needs to improve at their community school.
Though state officials didn't bother to announce the publication of the data nor create any helpful guides for those interested in accessing the dashboard, it does represent a step forward in how Alabama shares public data that form the foundation for making improvements in public schools.
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The state's late-Friday-before-a-three-day-weekend data posting has become a pattern. .
In April of this year, the state posted high school graduation rates late on a Friday afternoon just prior to a three-day weekend (Confederate Memorial Day) and then had to pull down that data after it was found to be inaccurate. It took an additional four months to re-post accurate graduation rates.
And again, there's no press release or other information with the dashboard to help the public and the media understand what the data shows.
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