New report awards Tennessee an A for keeping parents informed about COVID learning loss

A graphic from CRPE shows which states have provided the most transparent data on learning loss. 

While most states are struggling to provide parents and student advocates with transparent data about “learning loss” that came as a result of COVID-19, Tennessee is among the handful of states that has consistently made longitudinal student performance data available to education stakeholders.

A CRPE graphic shows which states had the most usable report card websites. 

According to a recent report from the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), it’s “not easy at all” for parents and student advocates in most states to compare student performance before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The report graded all 50 states’ and Washington, DC’s school report card websites on an A-F scale, based on how easy it would be for a parent or advocate to find longitudinal data on performance going back to pre-COVID times. Only seven states earned an A: Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee.

“Our findings reveal that most states are failing to provide accessible, transparent longitudinal performance data—at a time when parents, advocates, and the general public need it most to address continued pandemic learning loss,” an announcement about the report said.

Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at the University of Southern California and contributor to the CRPE report, said in a recent blog post published in The 74 that he was shocked to see that only a handful of states’ report cards have made data relating to learning loss accessible.

“I expected they would contain most of the information [about student performance] we sought and would mostly be pretty usable. I was wrong. I think everyone on our team was incredibly disappointed by many of the state report card websites and their inability to answer our primary questions of interest about the effects of COVID on student outcomes,” he said in the article.

The report said that while data about learning loss was mostly available in the seven A-rated states, each state still varied in how visible they made the performance of different student populations, such as students with disabilities and non-white students among others.  

“Delaware made longitudinal data by student group impossible to find. It was easy to find longitudinal data and student group data separately, but we could not find the intersection on the main webpage. The same was true in Tennessee, where longitudinal data were also a bit buried, though findable with some ingenuity,” the report said, noting that Tennessee’s report card was still much more navigable and useable than most.

Tennessee’s Report Card gives parents the ability to see how their child’s school performed on state testing and it provides a School Letter Grade for how well the school is serving students.

While the CRPE report recommended that most states in general should make their online report cards more usable to increase transparency moving forward, researchers said it would be ideal for states to “band together” to create more uniform models for gathering and presenting student performance data.

The report said the federal government could incentivize such an effort by “supporting templates or models that could be adapted rather than leaving each state on its own,” among other recommendations.

“There is no reason to have 51 completely different models of report cards, and many of the most unusable report cards were from smaller or more rural states that might not have the internal capacity to create more appealing interfaces. For instance, of the 13 F states, all are in the bottom 30 states in population size,” it read. “States should consider working together, perhaps led by an organization like the Council of Chief State School Officers, to improve report cards.”