The 2015 Excellent Schools Detroit (ESD) K-12 Scorecard — which the Ford School’s Education Policy Initiative (EPI) helped develop — was released last week. More than 200 schools, including private and charter schools, were evaluated and assigned “A” through “F” letter grades.
The Scorecard included schools — public, private, and charter — located in Detroit, as well as those located outside the city where at least half of the student body was comprised of Detroit residents.
Just 10 percent of the 212 schools received a grade of C+ or higher, according to a Detroit News story published Thursday.
ESD, a nonprofit coalition of community and education leaders, aims to serve as a resource to help families choose the right school of children, according to its website. To determine school rankings and grades, multiple qualitative and quantitative measures — including test scores and survey data from students, parents and teachers — are used.
This year’s scorecard is “more accurate than ever" due to the use of student-level data, ESD says. Additional information on the Scorecard’s measures can be found here.
First debuted in 2010, the Scorecard has been revised and enhanced several times. The 2013 version was the first that assigned each a letter grade based on performance.
Along with EPI, the Michigan Department of Education (MDE) and the Center for Education Performance and Information (CEPI) assisted in providing and analyzing data used to evaluate each school.
The Scorecard’s release and findings were covered in both the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press.
The Education Policy Initiative is a program within the Ford School that brings together nationally-recognized education policy scholars focused on the generation and dissemination of policy-relevant education research.