State Education Department Launches Parent Dashboard

The New York State Education Department (NYSED) today launched a Parent Dashboard to increase transparency and make information about school performance and other school-level data easier for parents and the public to access, Interim Commissioner Betty A. Rosa announced. The Parent Dashboard features a clean, simple design to better provide parents with information about their child’s school.

“Our ESSA plan contains strategies to improve equity, and one of those strategies is to provide data to parents in a way that is most useful to them through the Parent Dashboard,” said Board of Regents Vice Chancellor T. Andrew Brown. “The Parent Dashboard provides parents with the information necessary to be effective advocates for their children, helping them to achieve educational success.”

“The State Education Department strives to maintain strong connections with families and communities,” Interim Commissioner Rosa said. “A key aspect of this connection is transparency. The Parent Dashboard increases data transparency by providing parents with valuable information about their child’s school, enabling them to make informed decisions about their child’s education.”

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires that all state and local agencies receiving Title I funding provide the public with an annual report card evaluating school performance and progress. To that end, NYSED designed the Parent Dashboard to meet these requirements in a way that is informative and user-friendly for parents and the public. The Dashboard offers information on all public schools including charter schools.

Parent and Stakeholder Feedback

In 2019, NYSED gathered feedback from parents and stakeholders to guide the work of developing the Parent Dashboard. The data elements that parents ranked highest on the survey are available on the Parent Dashboard.

NYSED is now gathering additional feedback from parents and stakeholders to guide further enhancements to the Parent Dashboard. NYSED will use this feedback to identify the data that is most useful to parents and the public and to make improvements to the website. We invite parents and other stakeholders to explore the Parent Dashboard and then provide feedback via an online survey. The survey is available in 17 languages, including:

• Arabic
• Bengali
• Burmese
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Chinese (Traditional)
• English
• French
• Haitian Creole
• Japanese
• Karen
• Nepali
• Punjabi
• Russian
• Somali
• Spanish
• Urdu
• Uzbek

New Website Features

Fundamentally, ESSA is about creating a set of interlocking strategies to promote educational equity by providing support to districts and schools as they work to ensure that every student succeeds. To help achieve this, New York’s ESSA plan includes the development of the Parent Dashboard.

The Parent Dashboard provides access to the following school-level data elements:

• Student Enrollment and Ethnicity
• Average Class Size
• School Climate
• Accountability Status
• Assessment Results
• Financial Transparency
• Graduation Rate
• College, Career, and Civic Readiness
• School/District Location and Contact Information

The data on the Parent Dashboard will be updated annually. Additional education data is available on NYSED’s public data website, including detailed data on enrollment, assessments, graduation rates, and much more.

Student Data Privacy

NYSED takes its obligation to secure Personally Identifiable Information (PII) seriously. All information on the New York State Parent Dashboard is displayed at the school or district level. No individual student information is available on the Parent Dashboard. Find more information about our commitment to ensuring the security and privacy of student data on NYSED’s Data Privacy and Security web page.

ESSA is Equity

The final NYS ESSA plan fostering equity in education for New York’s students, expands measures for school support and accountability and student success, and requires school-level improvement plans for the lowest performing schools overall, as well as schools with the lowest performance for certain student populations.

New York State is committed to ensuring that all students succeed and thrive in school no matter who they are, where they live, where they go to school, or where they come from. The plan includes strategies for supporting the professional growth of educators and ensuring that all students, including Multilingual learners/English language learners, immigrant students, migratory youth, students with disabilities, homeless youth, and neglected and delinquent youth, have access to a well-rounded, culturally responsive and sustaining education that supports students’ academic and social-emotional development.

ESSA strategies to foster equity include to: address disparities in training for teachers to help them be effective in the classroom; provide students more access to rigorous high school coursework; make schools equally welcoming environments for all students; increase fiscal transparency in school building spending; and use multiple measures to allow students to demonstrate proficiency in state learning standards.

ESSA also provides states and LEAs with funding to provide additional support to certain groups of students as well as to schools that have been identified for additional support. The plan also ensures that all students receive a culturally responsive and sustaining education that supports their academic and social-emotional development. Additional information about ESSA is available on our Every Student Succeeds Act web page.

Please visit NYSED’s Data Help Center for questions, comments, and feedback about the Parent Dashboard.