California, Where Orange is the New Red and School Accountability Just Got Much Harder to Read

Conor P. Williams wrote for the LA School Report about school accountability in California:

Oh, California, you paradise, you far-flung western shoal, you frontier beyond purple mountains and fruited plains, you earth-shaking technological marvel, you never-ending party — California, you’re the land of good news, where the economy booms and the culture is wildly, diversely, supremely cool. You’re the golden realm at the end of our national rainbow.

Fittingly, California communicates the quality of its schools through a veritable panoply of colors. I dunno about you, but whenever I look at it, I think Trivial Pursuit. There’s a bunch of circles broken into colorful wedges, each round whole broken into a bunch of important component parts. Anyway, that polychromatic data explosion is designed to give parents a view of how their family’s school is performing. (For comparison’s sake, here are a few examples from Louisiana’s and Georgia’s school report card systems.)