My column today at WHYY’s Newsworks looks at JerseyCAN’s recent release of its “2013 School Report Cards.” How do these individual public school profiles compare with the NJ Department of Education’s far more complex School Performance Reports?

This past April the N.J. Department of Education unveiled its new “School Performance Reports,” replacing the tired summative analyses of each public school in the state. Last week a new organization called JerseyCAN, an arm of the national education reform group 50CAN, released its own N.J. school profiles called “The 2013 School Report Cards.”

If the state education department’s Performance Reports are caricatures of granularity, the JerseyCAN Report Cards are monuments to simplicity. There’s no middle ground here, only two extremes, and it’s not too hard to find flaws in both versions. Nonetheless, they offer a consistent portrayal of New Jersey’s public school system.

Read the rest here.