The Owl: Briefer is Better with Accountability Reports — and Less Costly

ISSUE 48 | JUNE 11, 2002

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"More" does not equal "better" in accountability reporting. With some districts' SARCs running a dozen pages or longer, accountability reports are becoming impenetrable. Quite a paradox. The more disclosures the legislature requires, the less parents are inclined to read them.

Brevity is indeed a virtue. Research supports this conclusion. Education Week's Quality Counts: 1999 published a report by KSA Plus which showed that parents, when asked, strongly preferred brief reports. But parents also wanted to know that more detailed information was available on demand.

Of course, full-length reports are necessary if you're to meet the compliance requirements of the Education Code and federal law. (See the legal details.)

One district that's solved the paradox of full-versus-summary reporting is San Diego City Schools. This year they stopped publishing their six-page reports and instead issued a pair of reports for each school. The summary is just two pages long, and centered on analysis of testing data. The longer report is a fully completed version of the technical template issued by the CDE's SARC group in the Office of Policy and Evaluation. (See both reports.)

The commitment to printing and distributing documents is a longstanding tradition, according to Leah Baylon, who together with her boss, Peter Bell, runs the accountability program for the district. In fact, it is their commitment to reaching parents that made printing the two-page format so handy. It is both accessible and economical. For further information about their success with this approach, send them an email.

This two-document solution is the same one that we at School Wise Press have been delivering to our district accountability clients for two years. It works for parents. It works for compliance monitors. It minimizes printing costs, enabling you to distribute reports to your public, as the legislature intended. See samples of our clients work.

Like San Diego, many are printing SARCs, as well as putting them online. They are satisfying compliance monitors at the same time as they satisfy parents who want to know only key factors. And with detailed full-length reports, they're providing school specific reports that even principals can use for staff development or grant applications.

Like San Diego, these districts are cost conscious, so they work hard to realize the greatest value from their investment in accountability reporting. Can you say you are doing the same?

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