If you got lost enroute, you can call up this one elementary school straightaway.

What makes this report exemplary are these five factors.

1. Clear concepts. The summary categories used in this report are not simplistic. Schools are assigned a grade, based on students test scores. It also displays the schools nearby, along with the grades each of them have earned, as well. All reports contain five panels: safety, student performance, school history, about our staff, and a taxpayers' report. Rather than report everything, Colorado educators wisely decided to focus on key factors in each of these five areas, and avoid overwhelming their reader with an onslaught of detail.

2. Clear writing. You'll find no education jargon, no acronyms. No indexes go unexplained. The safety section lists bad news incidents (fights, drug or alcohol abuse), and the consequences measured out to those who transgressed. Very smart. Very straightforward.

3. Measure what counts. Teacher turnover is revealed. School safety factors are meaningful. Testing results are arrayed over four easy criteria, from unsatisfactory to advanced. Test trend data is also presented. However, I do wish its creators had included graduation rates in the high school report, and explained that its dropout rate was the one-year event rate.

4. Professional design. From the use of data visualizations to typography, from its use of two-color to the trifold format, this design is first-rate.

5. High data density. The Colorado folks are able to fit a lot on two sides of this tri-folded 11x17 piece. Two factors explain their success: they know what to ignore (hence no crowding problems), and the balanced proportions of their design make the maximal use of the available space.

Of course, Colorado state Department of Education folks publish these reports, not local districts. This centralized publishing operation provides citizens a degree of consistency, as well as easy access to documents online. That's quite a contrast to our California accountability reporting system, where each district creates its own report.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Compare the quality of your reports to those of Colorado's. Are your reports as good as theirs in any of the five categories above? Then make the same comparison, using the reports of some of your neighboring districts. You can find them on the California Department of Education's website.

The weakness of locally produced accountability reports is increasingly obvious when faced with Colorado's work. It's a fair guess that our states legislators may one day look at the hodge-podge, rag-tag collection of the SARCs districts produce, and decide this job is too important to leave to locals. (One bill introduced by Assemblywoman Lynn Leach this session, in fact, proposed exactly this centralized publishing of SARCs.)

If those of you at the district level are going to convince the legislature that the responsibility for accountability reporting should remain at the local level, you should prepare to invest in higher quality reports. Given that the CDE started compliance monitoring of SARCs this May, and the Federal DoE's September 2002 deadline for implementing school and district accountability reports, now is the time to get started upgrading your SARC program.