Explore education data that directly affect your child: LearnDC.org

LearnDC, the website parents can use to browse through school report cards, will now offer an additional set of interactive data.
Pulling numbers from this year’s Equity Reports, a new feature will offer an easy dive into sliceable sets of demographic, achievement and discipline statistics for each school in the District. (Here’s an example for the Duke Ellington School of the Arts.)
“The online tool allows families and community members to explore both current and historic data,” said Katherine Ward, the vice president of an education-focused communications firm that has spearheaded the website since its inception, Collaborative Communications.
Now, they will be able to “interpret that information themselves in a way that makes meaning of the data,” she added.
The online Equity Reports will also offer new data on academic growth according to gender.
The District started publishing the yearly Equity Reports — a collaboration between the Deputy Mayor for Education, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, DC Public Schools, the DC Public Charter School Board and the NewSchools Venture Fund — last year. But in 2014, they were delivered in PDFs.
Putting the data online will also allow users to analyze educational trends over time.
“We will begin to build on the data that’s already there,” Ward said. If the reports continue to be hosted on LearnDC, they will become more and more valuable over time, with each new year introducing an additional layer of information.
In 2012, Collaborative Communications and Social Driver teamed up to build the LearnDC website, a project of the OSSE that presents a searchable database of school report cards. Last year, the two companies won the $15,000 My School Information Design Challenge first-place prize for a platform of school data. The competition was run by the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a nonprofit chaired by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush that advocates for education reform.