Tom Torlakson

Do you want to know the graduation or dropout rates at a high school or how students there performed on college readiness exams? Or the number of student suspensions or expulsions at a school? Or the percentage of English learner students who made progress toward English proficiency?

All of that information — and much more — can be found in an online report announced Monday by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson. The report provides valuable information about schools under California’s new funding formula in a format that is easy to access and understand.

The California Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) State Priorities Snapshot (Snapshot) makes available three years of data on schools in three state priority areas: student achievement, student engagement, and school climate.

Users can get information on school demographics, Advanced Placement exam results, and participation in career-technical education programs, among other topics. The Snapshot contains district- and state-level data for comparison purposes.

The Snapshot is available on the California Department of Education’s (CDE) Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) Reports Web page. It supersedes the School Quality Snapshot, which was released in October 2012 and provided an overview of information about schools and their performance on key indicators reported in the School Accountability Report Card.

With the passage of the 2013–14 Budget Act and implementation of the new funding formula, districts, county offices of education, and charter schools are required to annually produce Local Control and Accountability Plans (LCAPs), which require more than two dozen data elements. The CDE developed the Snapshot to graphically display LCFF data collected by the state.

The Snapshot allows users to get a report on a local educational agency or school and a detailed report that covers data at both the local agency or school level and at the student-group level. The Snapshot is organized by the three-state priority areas, with each area distinguished by its own background color.

The LCFF Reports Web page also includes an LCFF Funding Snapshot and access to individual LCAPs. The CDE first published the LCFF Funding Snapshot online in June 2014. The report shows key LCFF data elements and summarizes individual entitlement calculations for all school districts and charter schools. It brings together information from various LCFF funding exhibits into a concise and easily understandable format, and provides LCFF entitlement summaries for the 2013–14 and 2014–15 fiscal years.

The LCFF Reports Web page and the State Priorities Snapshot were developed and designed using existing state resources by CDE staff from the Analysis, Measurement, and Accountability Reporting Division; School Fiscal Services Division; Local Agency Systems Support Office, and the Technology Services Division.