Earlier this year, the Indiana Department of Education released a statewide dashboard containing data for school corporations. The Indiana Graduates Prepared to Succeed (Indiana GPS) Dashboard had been created in response to the House Enrolled Act 1514, which required the Indiana State Board of Education to provide a statistical dashboard evaluating the state’s schools and was made with the intent of measuring and sharing the data of schools’ academic performance to improve upon Indiana’s education system for the future.
“It will give a more accurate measure of how the school is doing over numerous metrics, rather than just giving them a letter grade. While the state is still working on how they are going to measure some of these metrics, once completed it will be a good measuring stick on where we are excelling and where we need to focus our improvement initiatives,” said Superintendent Greg Walker.
The GPS Dashboard provides many categories regarding attendance rate, college and career coursework, the average money invested per student, and SAT and placement test averages. All of these categories contain statistics which compare to the state average.
The website is available to everyone, allowing parents, school administrators, students, and community members complete access to data about their school. This allows transparency in numerous categories also allows parents to see how their students’ schools measure up to others.
One category on the GPS Dashboard, attendance rate, is determined by the amount of students with at least a 94% attendance rate. In the county, Paoli has the lowest attendance rate, with a 50.7% attendance rate compared to other Orange County schools. Orleans has the highest, 73.8%, and Springs Valley falls in between with an attendance rate of 65.7%.
Another data category is SAT performance, determined by the average of all students who reach performance benchmarks. Based on this statistic, Paoli has an average of 956, Orleans has an average of 888, and Springs Valley has the highest, 967.
Graduation rate is another statistic that the dashboard shares, but this data is split into two categories: Graduation rate with waivers, and graduation rate without waivers. A waiver is for students who do not fulfill the graduation requirements but are under specific circumstances to graduate regardless, such as a student who moves to a school just before the end of their senior year. Of this category, Orleans has the lowest of both, Paoli has
a significantly higher graduation rate with and without waivers, and Springs Valley has the highest in both statistics.
For a deeper dive into the GPS Dashboard, visit the PHS website for the link or visit indianagps.doe.in.gov.
