A+ Schools is pleased to release the First Annual Community School Progress Report. Some of you attended our very first public forum in the Spring of 2004 and helped with the initial design of the idea for the report. We hope you are pleased with the final product.
In this age of data-driven assessment of public school performance, we want to point out that despite all the data in the school-by-school reports, we have not assigned summary, overall evaluations for each school (although we have provided the Rand SPI and ASA ratings). We respect that some of our readers will be disappointed with our decision in this regard, and we want to explain our reasoning.
Our objective in this first report, as stated in the Introduction (below), is to generate a community conversation about the information. We believe the data is crucial, and the indicators the data describe are serious and complex matters. While some sort of ranking or overall “grade” was tempting to assign, we decided against something like that – at least in this first report – so the conversations might not fall into arguments about the rankings, but would, on the contrary, get into the very serious and complex matters at hand for each school and for the District as a whole.
Those conversations can lead to significant improvements in educational quality, which is what this report, and those to follow in future years, is all about. We believe we help those conversations to happen and to be productive, as Peter Drucker might say, because we are getting the right information to the right people, including you, at the right time. You can help by sharing this information with people we may have missed. And you can help us assure that future reports will contribute to the effectiveness of those conversations by completing the feedback form and/or otherwise contacting us with your comments and suggestions.
We want to extend a special thanks to the people listed in the Report – the A+ Schools board and staff, and the group of consultants who contributed to the creation of this report. They labored on this project for many months, and they demonstrated, over and over, their commitment to it. We also thank our funders, also listed inside, whose support makes this report possible. And, finally, we want to thank Superintendent Mark Roosevelt and his staff, and the Board of Education for giving us access to data in an organized way that facilitated the final presentation.
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A+ Schools
Pittsburgh's Community Alliance for Public Education
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Suite 1850
Pittsburgh, PA 15219
412.258.2660
412.258.2666 fax