Frequently Asked Questions

Designed by a community research team of youth and parents in each school district, the SCOREcards are a tool that measures what matters to students and families of color, students and families experiencing economic hardship, and others most impacted by educational inequities in their school district.

The SCOREcard features four education equity issues that community members identified as priorities, along with a set of indicators – specific data points that help to measure the school system’s performance in these areas.

The SCORE project is centered around the development of racial and educational equity indicators -- sets of data points that help to measure the school system’s performance on issues important to the community. The SCORE issue areas were identified from lived experiences, as well as the visions that the community has for a just and equitable school system.

SCORE’s community-created indicators can help to show the extent to which the school system is progressing toward students’ and parents’ visions for equitable schools. They can also help to measure differences and disparities faced by those most impacted by inequities, as well as progress (or lack of progress) over time. 

School districts typically collect data on a range of indicators, such as those you find on the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) annual school and district report cards, and the Providence Public School District’s Turnaround Action Plan. However, these don’t always speak to what students and families want to know, and may not be presented in ways that are accessible. The Providence SCOREcard aims to give students and families access to information to inform and support advocacy and solution-building around the issues they care about most. The SCOREcard’s indicators also help districts to understand and be accountable to community priorities. 

The indicators in the SCOREcard were developed by students and parents and speak to community educational and racial equity priorities. These priorities were drawn from lived experience as well as the visions that the community has for a just and equitable school system. 

School districts typically collect data on a range of indicators, such as those you find on the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) annual school and district report cards, and the Providence Public School District’s Turnaround Action Plan. However, these don’t always speak to what students and families want to know, and may not be presented in ways that are accessible. The SCOREcard aims to give students and families access to information to inform and support advocacy and solution-building around the issues they care about most. The SCOREcard’s indicators also help districts to understand and be accountable to community priorities. 

Data to address SCOREcard indicators fall into one of three categories:

• Data that is publicly available (i.e., SurveyWorks, RIDE website)

• Data that the district collects but isn’t publicly available (i.e, counselor to student ratios)

• Data that, to the best of our knowledge, is aspirational and not currently being collected (i.e. climate surveys around parent engagement events, etc.)

Some of the data reflected in our indicators is publicly available and can be found in places like the SurveyWorks database, the RIDE district report cards, [add other sources and link them]. However, some data we requested directly from the district. If you would like to see this data, get in contact with us at cycle_score@rwu.edu. 

The SCOREcard is a tool to track the state of racial and educational equity in the Providence Public School District and to provide community leaders and organizations with data to inform and advocate for solutions to racial equity issues. Individuals and organizations can use the SCOREcard to understand the district’s complex equity challenges, to monitor changes over time, and to hold district and state leaders and institutions accountable.

The SCOREcard is a living resource, and we will be adding new data and analyses on a regular basis. Sign up here for our email updates and check back regularly for new additions.

In many cases, our community-identified indicators differ from those that are publicly available.  We have tried to collect as much publicly available data as possible, and are working with the school district to request data that exists but is not yet made public.  

Additionally, some of what community members have asked to be measured in the SCOREcard is, to the best of our knowledge, not currently being collected In these cases, this SCOREcard represents a call to action for the school system, in partnership with community organizations, to collect data in areas that matter to the community, and to make it publicly accessible. As we get access to more data, more indicators will be populated and our SCOREcard will be stronger. (Sign up here for news and updates!) 

Although our SCOREcards have indicators covering many different priority areas, we know that there are many important things that the SCOREcard does not touch on. Our team decided to start with these four areas as a focus because these were named by students, parents, and educators. Ultimately, the SCOREcard is a living document, and as priorities shift or new barriers for students and families appear, our hope is to continue growing this tool to be able to reflect these changes. 

The Rhode Island KIDS Count Factbook is a great resource if you are interested in data about what impacts youth and families.

Our team is always interested in partnerships with folks trying to do this work in their own communities. We created an online toolkit that has many of the steps that we took to create the SCOREcard. If you want to know more, please get in touch with us at cycle_score@rwu.edu.

We are always looking for ways to continue building the SCOREcard. If you know where data for any of these indicators could be found, please email cycle_score@rwu.edu.

A very low number of students are excluded from data in our indicators because of the way they are tracked by school districts or the department of education. For example, students who are outplaced to other schools outside of the district because they need specific supports the district is unable to provide, are not reflected on the data we have visualized. The number of students in these situations are extremely low (in some cases a less than 5 students and in most cases there are none), so their exclusion from the data should not impact the overall trends you should be able to see in the visualizations. We felt like including a separate category for these specific cases would have made our visualizations more confusing.