The Mississippi Department of Education has announced a new tool that they hope will provide more insight into schools across the state.
The MDE announced the creation of the ‘Mississippi Succeeds Report Card’, an interactive online tool designed to help parents and communities more easily evaluate schools across the state.
The report card, which will be launched tomorrow, will include detailed information about each school and district’s academic performance. Among its many features, the report card provides the following:
- Academic performance by student groups,
- Teacher workforce data,
- Student disciplinary actions (suspensions and expulsions), and
- Chronic absenteeism rates.
“Families and communities should have an easy-to-use tool to find out how their schools are preparing their children to be successful in the future. Whether from a computer or a smartphone, parents now have convenient access to information critical to their child’s education,” said Dr. Carey Wright, state superintendent of education.
The online report card will include information about schools and districts on how well students performed on state tests, their level of knowledge of grade-level learning goals and their academic growth from one year to the next.
Also, because of changes in federal education law under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Mississippi will include additional details in report cards that will give educators, parents and communities a better picture of overall school success.
Another feature of the online report card tool is that schools identified for additional support from the state based on low performance in one or more measures will be noted on the individual school report cards. Under ESSA, Mississippi identifies schools in three ways:
- Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI), formerly referred to as priority schools, addresses overall performance and includes schools 1) performing in the lowest-performing 5 percent of all Title I funded schools, and 2) all high schools failing to graduate 67 percent or less of their students.
- Targeted Support and Improvement (TSI) , formerly referred to as focus schools, includes schools that have subgroups performing 1) in the lowest 50 percent of overall accountability index; 2) in lowest quartile of 3-year average gap-to-goal; and 3) in lowest quartile of 3-year improvement toward gap-to-goal closure.
- Additional Targeted Support and Improvement (ATSI) that addresses schools with sub-group performance comparable to the lowest-performing 5 percent of Title I schools.
The launch of the Mississippi Succeeds Report Card online tool comes after more than two years of public discussion and planning around the state’s ESSA plan and report card. Mississippi collaborated with educators, parents, business and community leaders statewide to create and report on an improved education system that provides all students with equal access and opportunity to high-quality learning.
Part of that strategy was to create a user-friendly platform able to host a wide array of information on school and district quality and present that data in a way that was both transparent and easy to understand. The tool will be enhanced over the next several months to include additional information, such as per-pupil expenditure by district.
Beginning Sept. 20, the public can access the Mississippi Succeeds Report Cards and orientation video at www.msrc.mdek12.org.
