Bringing home a better report card

Ohio gets high marks in my book for the newest changes in its school report card.

It lists a wider range of measures of student and school performance, such as mean scores for the SAT and ACT, the percentage of students taking the college boards, the number taking Advanced Placement tests and how they performed.

The new indicators can help parents and taxpayers see, not only performance gains on state proficiency tests, but also gains in students' aspirations. A high-performing school should have more and more students who take rigorous courses and who apply to college. As a parent and a taxpayer, I'd gladly see some test scores dip if it meant a widening of the pool of students willing to challenge themselves to tougher classes.

And providing more information can lead communities to ask deeper and more thoughtful questions about their schools. If a district's Advanced Placement enrollment is low, for example, it may lead parents to ask how many AP courses the school offers and how that number compares to those of other districts.

Students' performance on standardized state tests -- such as the Ohio Graduation Test -- is only one measure of how well the school is doing. Find a school that keeps deepening and broadening its curriculum, and that encourages students to take a risk with tougher courses and to aspire to more prestigious colleges, and you'll see a school that is poising itself for long-term, substantive progress.