The State Board of Education (SBE) and the California Department of Education (CDE) recently unveiled the California School Dashboard, a new online tool that provides parents, educators and the public with information they can use to evaluate schools and school districts in an easy-to-understand report card format.

The California School Dashboard is part of California’s new school accountability and improvement system. The state’s former accountability system – the Academic Performance Index (API) – relied exclusively on standardized tests and gave schools a single score. The API system was suspended three years ago.

“The California School Dashboard provides local communities with meaningful and relevant information on how well schools and districts are doing,” said State Board of Education president Michael W. Kirst. “It will help in local decision-making by highlighting both the progress of schools and student groups, shining a light on disparities and helping stakeholders pinpoint where resources should be directed.”

Kirst added that the dashboard is only part of the effort to offer more information on school performance.

“As exciting a development as this is, it’s important to understand that the California School Dashboard itself is a work in progress. It will be a far more valuable tool one year from now and three years from now than it is today as more indicators come online, as feedback is incorporated and as improvements are made,” Kirst said.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson called the launch a “historic milestone” in preparing students for success in college and careers.

“The California School Dashboard is a resource unlike anything we’ve ever had before,” Torlakson said. “I think of it as a high-tech report card for our schools. Just as our children receive report cards with multiple grades in multiple subject areas, the California School Dashboard provides us with many different measures of a school’s performance – where it’s strong, where it needs to improve, how it’s doing over time. The California School Dashboard is yet another example of the innovation and positive change taking place in our public school system, which is also evident in increased local control, more rigorous academic standards, cutting-edge online assessments and billions of dollars in voter-approved school funding and school infrastructure improvement.”