How SDP Fellow Jessica Merville reformed accountability reports in New Jersey.
Parental involvement and school accountability are both vital elements in a healthy education system. To unite schools and families in the spirit of both accountability and data-driven decision making, the New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE) publishes annual School Performance Reports with a wealth of information about student and school performance. There was only one problem: these reports were being grossly underutilized.
Parent engagement is top-of-mind lately, as institutions are seeking greater transparency and trust with their communities. NJDOE has framed their School Performance Reports as a key part of the overall accountability system and wanted them to be an effective tool in identifying the performance of a community’s students and schools. Yet with over 1.3 million students in New Jersey, fewer than 100,000 users viewed the 2015-16 report. This is why Strategic Data Project (SDP) Fellow Jessica Merville was charged with applying her skills in research and data to overhaul the reports and increase their impact on education in New Jersey.
Merville’s first step as a fellow was not to manage and analyze data. Instead, she was charged with uncovering the disconnect between the reports and their intended audiences. Why weren’t stakeholders accessing the data? She organized focus groups with stakeholders across the educational spectrum from parents and teachers to school and district leadership. This effort revealed that many parents were either unaware of these reports or found them confusing.
Merville’s application to the SDP Fellowship program was a natural progression. With prior experience at the NYC Department of Education, Merville was ready to expand her knowledge of and acumen with education data, specifically. “My position in NYC was in enrollment, so that was where my focus was,” she reflects. “Yet the SDP Fellowship really expanded my data skills in education. I gained a broader exposure to a lot of different types of education data that I hadn’t seen or worked with before.”
Merville valued SDP’s focus on using data to tell a story. “It’s not just about dumping numbers on a page—you really have to help people understand the big picture that the data is pointing to.” To enact this truth in New Jersey’s School Performance Reports, Merville built robust design and testing activities into the project. Throughout these processes, Merville and the team made strategic decisions about what to include on the reports, how to present them, and ultimately tested their decisions against the experiences real-world users. And the final product—a more parent-friendly report that empowered their audience with critical information and ideas for how to use it—was released with great impact. The 2016-17 report, released in January of 2018, received more than double the views as the previous year, and counting. “Jessica's efforts," Merville’s project supervisor James Riddlesperger reflects, "traveling all across the state to speak with the types of parents that we too often don't reach, also ensured that these were the best reports ever published in New Jersey.”
The conversation around data-driven decision making in education is often aimed at policy, whether at the federal, state, or district levels. Yet Jessica Merville’s project was an exercise in how to use data to inform decision making at a more grassroots level, invoking critical conversations between schools and parents. Part data project, part design project. Merville’s work empowered people to think about the things they needed and wanted to know about their schools. “Often, parents don’t feel like their schools or districts are giving them the information they want or need,” says Merville. “Yet these reports now tell a story with the data parents need. If they see an area where their school isn’t doing well, they can bring the reports to board meetings, parent groups—they can do something about it!”
Thinking of developing parent-friendly reports for your organization?
Merville suggests the following tips for better reporting data to parents.
Involve Parents
To understand what parents need from your reports, ask them! Ask them what they want from your reports, how they think they will use this information, and try to understand their thoughts and worries about their child’s educational experience. Show them different examples of reports and ask what they like and what they don’t.
Avoid Jargon
Speak the language of your audience, not of your organization. Really explain what you’re trying to say without reverting to too much shorthand. Avoid acronyms, symbols, or other industry-specific language that won’t be widely understood.
Tell a story with data
Provide an explanation for why you’re showing the data, and clearly lay out what it means. Give them suggestions of how to use the data and outline what their next steps could be.
Additional Resources
Data Quality Campaign’s Show Me the Data
National PTA and Learning Heroes: What Makes a Good ESSA Report Card
Know Your School: Reimagining School Report Cards
My School Information Design Challenge entries