Although Oregon has made recent gains in its overall high school graduation rate, 21 percent of public school students entering grade 9 in 2014 did not graduate within four years, by 2018. To improve graduation rates, Oregon voters approved Ballot Measure 98 in 2016 to fund dropout prevention and college and career readiness initiatives in high schools. Many districts used the funding to adopt an early indicator and intervention system (EIIS) to identify students who are not on track to graduate on time by monitoring related indicators, such as chronic absenteeism, disciplinary infractions, course progression, and academic performance, through a frequently updated data system. Districts can tailor the system by setting their own on-track thresholds for each indicator to identify students at risk of not graduating on time, assigning those students to interventions, and monitoring student response to the interventions.

This study took advantage of the additional funding being offered to districts across the state to look at first-year effects on chronic absenteeism, disciplinary infractions, course progression, and academic performance by comparing the outcomes in 65 districts that adopted an EIIS to the outcomes in a set of similar districts that used the additional funding for other dropout prevention or college and career readiness initiatives. The study offers insight into the effectiveness of early efforts to scale up EIISs, a popular school-level intervention. EIIS adoption appears to have reduced the percentage of students who were chronically absent by 3.9 percentage points but does not appear to have had positive effects on the three other student outcomes during the first year: the percentage of students with disciplinary infractions, the percentage of grade 10 students who had acquired enough credits by the end of grade 9 to be considered on track for on-time graduation, or the percentage of grade 11 students meeting or exceeding proficiency standards on state math and English language arts tests. The findings offer the Oregon Department of Education information on the early effects of its efforts to promote EIIS across Oregon. The findings can also be used by other state and district education leaders to inform their considerations to scale up EIIS or other similar programs.

Education policymakers view transparency and accountability as critical to the success of schools. To support these goals, the District of Columbia Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) has developed an online school report card for communicating information about the characteristics and performance of schools. To support OSSE’s interest in making report cards more usable, this study assessed the effect of different designs on how easy the report cards are to use and understand, how easy it is to find information in them, and whether users would recommend the site to others.

The study found that moving the link to details of the district’s School Transparency and Reporting (STAR) framework from the top of the page to beneath the STAR score improved the site’s usability and that reporting the number of points possible for each metric led to a better understanding of how the score is calculated. The combination of design features that produced the best performance on all measures included these two design changes. Other designs had mixed effects. In particular, making year-over-year change in school performance salient made it easier to identify which schools had improved the most, but participants disliked this feature (demonstrated by lower ratings for usability and satisfaction). In general, participants who accessed the site with mobile devices had more difficulty using it. This study illustrates how policymakers and practitioners in other states can efficiently test school report card design changes at scale.