California has a wealth of data about K-12 public schools — test scores, attendance rates, who’s headed to college and more.

Finding it is another story.

Information about the state’s 5.8 million students and their schools is spread across at least five websites, each outfitted with dozens of filters, drop-down menus and color-coded graphics. That scattered approach to data transparency prevents parents from truly understanding how their children’s schools are faring — and taking action to improve them, according to a report released Thursday.

“I have a Ph.D. in education policy and I can barely navigate these sites,” said Morgan Polikoff, a USC professor who worked on the report. “How do we expect a typical parent to access this information and make sense of it?”

The report, published by the Center for Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University, gave California a “D” for school data transparency, compared to other states. Researchers looked at how states present test scores in math, social studies, reading and science, as well as absenteeism and graduation rates and English learner progress.

Connecticut, Michigan and Tennessee were among the states that received A’s for their easy-to-navigate data portals. California ranked alongside Arkansas, West Virginia and Arizona, among others.

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Dissecting the school data dashboard

The state’s primary data source for parents is the California School Dashboard. The Department of Education consults with data experts, including the Data Quality Campaign ’s “Show Me the Data” report, when it updates the information, said Elizabeth Sanders, spokesperson for the department. The state often makes adjustments based on advice from experts and parents, she said, and is continually seeking to improve its data portals.

Sanders was unaware of the methods Polikoff and his colleagues used to critique California’s data transparency, but “Show Me the Data” also dinged California for not showing year-over-year growth data. In fact, California is one of only four states nationwide that doesn’t show any growth data at all (the others are Kansas, Kentucky and Washington, D.C.)

“We always remain open to the feedback and needs of our families, and we look forward to understanding more,” Sanders said.

The education department unveiled the California School Dashboard in 2016-17 on the heels of the state’s shift to a revised funding formula that was meant to steer more money to underprivileged students. It was meant to paint a more nuanced picture of schools’ performance, beyond just test scores. The dashboard measures academic achievement alongside chronic absenteeism, graduation rates, suspension rates, college and career readiness and English learner progress, broken down by 13 student groups.

Schools are assigned colors based on their performance, but sometimes those colors can be misleading. For example, one school might rank as orange, the second-lowest color, if it’s made progress even though its scores remain very low. Another school might rank as red, the lowest color, if it’s shown little progress but has higher scores.

Last year, for example, Castlemont High School in Oakland earned an orange ranking in English even though its scores were 223 points below the state standard. Just a few miles away, Skyline High rated a lower color — red — even though its scores were only 123 points below the standard.

Researchers said the dashboard is unnecessarily opaque and cumbersome. While Polikoff generally supports showing a school’s performance in relation to the state standard, he also believes parents should have easy access to the test scores in a way they can understand. In addition, the dashboard should present year-over-year trends. Currently, users must collect the numbers themselves and make their own graphs.

Other organizations have also criticized California’s dashboard. EdTrust-West, an Oakland-based education research nonprofit, has said the confusing data prevents parents at low-performing schools from advocating for their children.

“The dashboard portrays performance data using colors that in many instances suggest that schools and districts are adequately supporting their students to succeed. This is not the case in far too many California schools, and it’s especially true for students of color and multilingual learners,” said Natalie Wheatfall-Lum, EdTrust-West’s director of TK-12 policy. “Families can’t be effective partners if we don’t give them a clear picture of what’s going on.”

Student data system ‘feels like a smokescreen’

California has other portals for student data, including Data Quest, an exhaustive database of the student population; the School Accountability Report Card, which shows information about specific schools such as how many teachers are credentialed, whether textbooks are current or if the school needs repairs; and the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, a breakdown of Smarter Balanced standardized test scores. The California Healthy Kids Survey looks at topics like substance use, bullying and parent involvement at the state, county and district levels.

This can be frustrating for parents trying to get a snapshot of their child’s school. Knowing where to find specific details — and putting them in context — can take hours.

“It feels like a smokescreen,” said Crystal Trull, a parent of three children in San Diego Unified. “Parents don’t understand what the data means, which makes it difficult to get a sense of a particular school.”

Adding to the confusion, Trull said, the state changes assessments every few years, making it almost impossible to gauge long-term trends.

Students are the ones ultimately harmed, she said. Parents might not have all the available information when evaluating a school, and their children risk falling behind. “By the time parents realize their children don’t actually have the skills they need, it could be too late,” she said. “And that’s the real tragedy here.”

Research backs that up. In a previous study, Polikoff and his colleagues at USC found a disconnect between parent concerns and policy analysis of the state of schools, particularly post-pandemic. An avalanche of research showed steep learning declines stemming from school closures, yet many parents seemed unfazed, Polikoff said.

“Experts raise all these alarm bells but parents don’t seem that concerned or even aware there’s a crisis,” Polikoff said. “So we decided to find out why. The lack of accessible data is likely one significant reason.”

Another reason is grade inflation, researchers found. If students are mostly getting A’s and B’s, parents are less inclined to pay attention to standardized test scores or alarming reports from policy experts, Polikoff said.

“Parents tend to think schools have their kids’ best interests in mind, and kids are resilient,” Polikoff said. “That can be true, but it can also mean that parents don’t always have a realistic idea of what’s actually happening.”

Better measures of student success?

At Irvine Unified, parent Jim Leung said he’d like to see the dashboard show specific test scores, not whether students are “meeting standards,” a metric that he says is not well defined. He’d also like more information about college readiness, social-emotional growth and life skills — topics that provide a far more accurate picture of how well schools are preparing students for the future, he said.

“Most students in Irvine already meet or exceed the standards, so the dashboard isn’t really helpful,” said Leung, father of a high school sophomore. “Parents want to go beyond the minimum. We want to know how well our schools are really preparing students for college and career and life in general.”

Some of that information — such as University of California and California State University admission numbers by high school — is available elsewhere online, but can be hard to locate.

“I know the information is out there,” Leung said. “But there’s so much data, and parents are busy.”

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This story was originally published by CalMatters and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.