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Welcome

 
In fall 2018, PDE introduced the Future Ready PA Index - a new, public-facing, one-stop location for comprehensive information and data on student and school success. Pennsylvanians wanted a more holistic tool for evaluating schools. In 2015, Governor Wolf charged the Department of Education with developing a new school measurement tool that would include a broader set of meaningful indicators. Over three years, leaders from the Department of Education met with thousands of educators, parents, advocates, policymakers, and business leaders from across Pennsylvania to determine what that new tool should look like.  
  • The Future Ready PA Index recognizes that students – and the schools that serve them – are more than just standardized test scores. It features a collection of indicators that illustrate academic proficiency, on-track progress, and college and career readiness – helping to demonstrate how schools are doing in preparing students for postsecondary success.
  • The Future Ready PA Index’s dashboard allows for a more comprehensive look at how Pennsylvania schools are educating ALL students. In addition to proficiency, the dashboard illustrates growth, achievement, and other data by student group - including economically disadvantaged students, English Learners, students receiving special education services, and racial and ethnic groups - improving transparency around student performance.
  • The Future Ready dashboard is easy to navigate - searchable by district, school, career and technical center, or location; and it includes basic information and demographic data for each school. The Future Ready PA Index also features helpful filters and options to compare multiple schools.

The Future Ready PA Index will serve as Pennsylvania’s one-stop location for comprehensive information about school success, and will use a dashboard model to highlight how schools are performing and making progress on multiple indicators.

 The dashboard approach to school reporting:   
  • Increases emphasis on student growth measures, which incentivizes a focus on all learners and is less sensitive to demographic variables.
  • Measures English language acquisition among ELL students, not simply performance on a test of grade level ELA standards.
  • Incentivizes career awareness instruction beginning at the elementary level.
  • Addresses the issue of unequal weighting of content areas in the current SPP.
  • Provides indicators of student success after graduation.
  • Increases the emphasis on student access to course offerings such as AP, IB, college credit, and CTE programs of study.
  • Allows LEAs to include locally-selected reading assessments (Grade 3) and math assessments (Grade 7) as additional snapshots of student progress.
  • Incentivizes schools to offer career pathways that culminate with high value, industry recognized credentials

Here are the links to the ESSA Federal Report: