WELCOME to the USC / School Performance Dashboard!

With this Interactive Report, you can:

1 > Evaluate individual schools;

2 > Compare the performance of multiple schools;

3 > Review the performance of a single school across several years; or

4 > Download the entire data set.

This comprehensive report on California charter schools is in its sixth year. School-performance.usc.edu provides online interactive access to all charter school performance data over multiple years. You can evaluate individual schools; compare the performance of multiple schools; review the performance of a single school across several years; or download the entire data set.

Celebrating their 20th birthday, California charter schools experienced the highest one-year growth in charter school history. In fall 2011, California – home to 912 charters, more than any other state – opened 118 new charter schools, a growth rate of 13 percent. Likewise, California's charter school enrollment grew by more than 13 percent from last year, pushing the number of students served to more than 412,000.

The School Performance Dashboard rates all California charter schools on 12 measures assessing financial resources and investment; school quality; student performance; and academic productivity. Unlike other school databases, ours assigns values – high, medium, low – to the measures and goes beyond state test scores. Dashboard users like knowing which schools are doing well, which are in the middle, and which are struggling. We also identify the state's top 10 charter schools, visible via a button on the interactive site.

New this year: The search engine has expanded – you can now search schools by largest racial/ethnic group of students, in addition to EL population and all the rest. Second, we added demographic information for each school: year founded, size of school, and percent of students eligible for Free/Reduced Price Meals.

Data Challenges: This year, we did not have the data necessary to calculate the Teaching Resources and the Teacher Qualification Indices due to the state's suspension of the California Basic Educational Data System (CBEDS). In 2009, the State Department of Education began to develop a system to replace CBEDS for teacher-specific data and stopped collecting this data in CBEDS. Unfortunately, the transition to the new system did not take place; the project was canceled due to implementation issues. Therefore, the columns in the reports on individual schools for these two rankings are shaded grey.

The USC School Performance Dashboard is released annually by the Center on Educational Governance at the University of Southern California. USC's Center on Educational Governance maintains its home through the USC portal at www.usc.edu/cegov/