Pennsylvania Department of Education details new Future Ready PA index, highlights modest gains and attendance shortfall

The Pennsylvania Department of Education on Tuesday described the PA Future Ready Index, a web tool intended to give communities a clearer, multi‑metric view of school performance and progress toward federal goals.

Department officials told the House Education Committee the index was designed to replace a single summative score with multiple indicators — state assessment measures, on‑track measures and college‑and‑career measures — and provide context about how a school compares with the state average and long‑term goals.

The index, Department deputy secretary Carrie Rowe said, shows “the percent of students that are proficient or advanced in a given area like English Language Arts, Math and Science,” adds contextual comparisons to the state average, and reports progress toward the long‑range ESSA goals. Rowe directed committee members to futurereadypa.org to view color‑coded results and directional arrows that indicate year‑to‑year change: “If you were to go to futurereadypa.org … you would be able to then to click on that and see, where they stand relative to the state average, where they are relative to that 02/1930 goal, and…