Iowa School Report Cards

The innovative measure of school success is still in early years but offers schools a fair assessment of individual schools
     Measuring academic success is a tricky task for educators; with so many factors that contribute to a child’s education — learning environment, demographics, intellectual capabilities, etc. — it’s a challenge to figure out how well a school or student performs.
     The Iowa Department of Education rolled out a new program over the last year that hopes to assess schools’ performances, yearly, which uses a wealth of data to pinpoint a school’s strengths and deficiencies.
     The assessment, the Iowa School Report Card, scores each school within a district individually, against a level of state benchmarks. Previously, the IDE classified schools on a list to determine a district’s success.
     Jen Koenen, shared curriculum director for Hampton-Dumont and CAL school districts, explained that the report card system provides an abundance of data that can be used to track demographics, gender, program and more. The current data available is from the fall 2014 school year, through spring 2015, Koenen said. Next year’s results are anticipated to be aggregated soon. 
     Read the full article in the October 12 edition of Hampton Chronicle.