Future Ready PA Index

Overview

The Pennsylvania Department of Education has recently released the Future Ready PA Index. This public site (https://futurereadypa.org/) is a collection of school progress measures related to school and student success. The Index includes a range of assessment, on-track, and readiness indicators, to more accurately report student learning, growth, and success in the classroom and beyond.

Key Points about the Future Ready PA Index

In fall 2018, PDE introduced the Future Ready PA Index – a new, public-facing, one-stop location for comprehensive information and data on student and school success.
Pennsylvanians wanted a more holistic tool for evaluating schools. In 2015, Governor Wolf charged the Department of Education with developing a new school measurement tool that would include a broader set of meaningful indicators. Over three years, leaders from the Department of Education met with thousands of educators, parents, advocates, policymakers, and business leaders from across Pennsylvania to determine what that new tool should look like.
The Future Ready PA Index recognizes that students – and the schools that serve them – are more than just standardized test scores. It features a collection of indicators that illustrate academic proficiency, on-track progress, and college and career readiness – helping to demonstrate how schools are doing in preparing students for post-secondary success.
The Future Ready PA Index’s dashboard allows for a more comprehensive look at how Pennsylvania schools are educating ALL students. In addition to proficiency, the dashboard illustrates growth, achievement, and other data by student group – including economically disadvantaged students, English Learners, students receiving special education services, and racial and ethnic groups – improving transparency around student performance.
The Future Ready dashboard is easy to navigate – searchable by district, school, career and technical center, or location; and it includes basic information and demographic data for each school. The Future Ready PA Index also features helpful filters and options to compare multiple schools.