USC/School Performance Dashboard 2011. A Report from the Center on Educational Governance/University of Southern California
Author: University of Southern California (USC), Center on Educational Governance (CEG)
Date: 2011-00-00
Type: Numerical/Quantitative Data
Subjects: Charter Schools,Educational Indicators,Governance,School Effectiveness,Educational Finance,Educational Quality,Academic Achievement,Productivity,Federal Programs,Accountability,Investment,Teacher Qualifications,English Language Learners,Classification,Language Arts,Mathematics,Elementary Secondary Education,Secondary School Curriculum,Graduation Rate,High Schools,College Readiness,Public Schools

In his 2011 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama declared that charter schools are a way to out-innovate and out-educate our competitors worldwide. The President believes that investment in education must be accompanied by reform, including the expansion of high-quality charter schools. President Obama has challenged states to lift limits that stifle growth among successful charter schools and has encouraged rigorous accountability for all charter schools. This report, in its fifth year, has a similar goal of accountability in reporting school data. Now titled &quot;USC School Performance Dashboard,&quot; it draws on California school data from 2003 to 2010. For the second year--CSI-USC Interactive, the online searchable database--allows users to compare the performance of individual charter schools over time or the performance of groups of charter schools to one another. As in prior years, financial and academic data submitted by school districts to the state of California evaluates charter schools in four areas: (1) Financial Resources and Investment; (2) School Quality; (3) School Performance; and (4) Academic Productivity. The big news for 2011 is that the nation's financial crisis has hit California public schools. Schools have less to work with, so their financial health is not as strong as it has been in past years. The bottom line: charter schools--like all public schools in the state--have less money to save and less to carry over from year to year. So how have charter schools responded? For one thing, they have tightened their belts. Schools have dramatically reallocated larger proportions of their operating budget into direct classroom instruction. Cuts in charters appear to be outside the classroom, such as counselors, school staff, and outreach personnel; those positions added when budgets were less lean are the first to go. Another trend across many of the &quot;Dashboard&quot; indicators is that charters, when compared to non-charter public schools, are overrepresented at the very top and the very bottom of the performance distribution. This applies to the School Performance indicators, the Academic Momentum indicators, and the School Productivity indicators. This may be due to the large increase in the number of charter schools reporting since the last Dashboard (more than 300 additional schools on some measures). Or perhaps the results relate to the aging of California's charter population: Some charter schools become high-performing as they age and learn from experience, while others flounder when faced with leadership changes and financial instability. A spotlight in this year's report is the highlighting of 10 high flyers among California's charter schools. These 10 charter schools had the highest combined ratings on the academic measures and school productivity indicators. The following are appended: (1) Data Sources and Terms; (2) Creating the Dashboard; and (3) Index and Data Sources. [For the 2010 report, see ED569148.]