“We’ve been doing testing and accountability for like two decades, and the fact that you still have so much data that’s just missing, or even if it’s there, you have to have a PhD in education policy, is problematic.”

That’s Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at USC Rossier and lead researcher of a new report released today from Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) called “How Transparent Are State School Report Cards About the Effects of COVID-19?”

The answer? Not very, say the researchers, who conclude the majority of states—including New Jersey– “are failing to provide accessible, transparent school performance data at a time when parents, advocates, and the general public need the information to address pandemic learning loss effectively.”

“We were incredibly disappointed by the quality of state report card websites,” said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. “We know students are not alright as they continue to suffer from the impacts of the pandemic, both in terms of their academic recovery and socio-emotional well-being. Yet it is often impossible or unreasonably difficult to access the data to help parents, educators, and advocates focus our recovery efforts and fight for the change and improvements students deserve. We hope that this review is a wake-up call for states and that leaders will take action by working together to improve the way they report school performance data for the public.”

New Jersey’s state school report cards, produced by the State Department of Education, are called “NJ Student Performance Reports.” (Find your district here.) CRPE gives New Jersey a letter grade of “C” for accessibility, transparency, and accountability, which puts us among the 34 states plus D.C. that received a “C” or lower. (There were 14 Cs, 8 Ds, and 13 Fs. Sixteen states earned A’s or B’s.)

Why did New Jersey’s report cards, which are supposed to allow parents to easily peruse school quality, score poorly? Here are CRPE’s findings:

• The summary report provides only a few high-level results.
• Drop-down menus produce perhaps too many ways to view the data, which might overwhelm users. Data quantity was also at times overwhelming (e.g., ELA/math performance data spread across 20 printed pages).
• Three-year graphs are available, but users had to return to the landing page to see prior years. The menu to switch between years didn’t work reliably and also required users to return to the home page.

“State report cards should be able to answer parents’ most important questions in a way that is clear and easy to use,”said Polikoff. “Right now, it is nearly impossible for a parent to see how effective a school is in raising student achievement in math and ELA or how many children graduate from a high school on time—and how that has changed over time. These are simple questions that parents deserve answers to so that they can compare the schools in their neighborhood and make informed choices about where to enroll their child. States have to do better.”

View the full report and interactive map here.