Ohio School Report Cards — District Achievement Download

Source. Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, Ohio School Report Cards, district-level Achievement download. The 2024–2025 edition is 24-25_Achievement_District.xlsx, generated September 11, 2025. Type. Primary source — machine-readable per-district outcome data. Location. reportcard.education.ohio.gov, Download Data → Achievement, district level.

What it contains. One row per district on the Performance_Index sheet: the Performance Index for 2024-25 and the two years before it, the Achievement Component Star Rating, the Index expressed as a percentage, the statewide maximum that percentage is taken against, and — the columns that make this file more than a score — the district’s tested students distributed across all seven achievement levels, from not tested through advanced plus.

Those seven columns are why the weights are knowable. The index is a weighted sum over that distribution and DEW publishes the weights nowhere this corpus holds. Printing the distribution beside the result, 607 times, is an overdetermined system in seven unknowns, and it solves: 100 for a district whose tested students are all proficient, and tenths from there, with an untested student counting zero. See crates/dispersion/tests/the_weights_behind_the_index.rs. verified

Why it matters here. This is the corpus’s only route to an outcome variable. Every metric in corpus/metric/ before it measured an input — expenditure, valuation, millage, state share. The Performance Index is the first measure of what the system produced rather than what it spent, and it is what makes the outcome formulation of adequacy testable rather than merely contested.

Access constraints. Freely available, no registration. XLSX.

Caveats, from the file’s own structure and DEW’s published methodology:

• Coverage is the rated population, not the funded population. The 2024–2025 file assigns a Performance Index to 607 traditional districts. The corpus’s other district cross-section, the Cupp Report, carries 606, and the FY2027 department model carries 609. Three counts, three populations, one year apart. They are not interchangeable and must not be pooled without a crosswalk. verified
• Continuous, unlike the star rating. The overall star rating collapses many districts into one category; the Index does not. Any analysis that needs to rank districts must use the Index, and any analysis quoting the star rating is answering a coarser question.
• And the rating is relative, which is the stronger objection. Maximum District Performance Index Score repeats one value — 109.8 — on every row, because R.C. 3302.03(D)(1)(c) defines it as the average of the highest two per cent of district scores for the year the report card is issued. It is refitted annually: 108.8 in 2022-23, 109.8 in 2024-25. The achievement rating is awarded on the Index over that, so it is a share of the top of the state and not a level, and 121 districts rose on the Index across those three years while falling on the share. Summing or averaging the maximum column measures nothing. verified
• The percentage is computed before the score is rounded. Dividing the published Index by the published maximum disagrees with the published percentage by a tenth on 131 of 607 districts. That is double rounding, not disagreement — a single unrounded index is consistent with both, every time. Anything reconstructed from the one-decimal columns inherits a tenth of slack, and the seven level shares are each rounded on their own, so they sum to between 99.8 and 100.2 rather than to 100. verified
• It is one construct. The Index summarizes state-test results for tested students. It is not a measure of school quality, and it is not the Progress (value-added) component, which is designed to capture growth independent of starting achievement and is a different file.
• Keyed by District IRN, which is the join key the rest of this corpus already uses.

Extracted. All 607 Performance Index values, the 2023-24 and 2022-23 scores in the same row, the achievement star rating, the Index percentage and its statewide maximum, and the seven achievement-level shares are committed at crates/dispersion/fixtures/report-card-2425-district-data.csv. The join to the corpus’s FY2024 cross-section is clean: 606 of the 607 match the Cupp Report on IRN, and all 607 match the report card’s spending and Expanded List files.

The first thing it showed: the Index tracks the economically disadvantaged share at −0.846, 71.6% of its cross-district variance. Any district-level correlate of this measure is partly that variable in disguise. verified

The two prior years are read. Adjacent years correlate at +0.988 and +0.989 and 2022-23 against 2024-25 at +0.981, with a median within-district three-year range of 2.1 points — so a single-year cross-section does stand in for a district’s Index, and the measure cannot detect anything that changes annually. verified All three sit inside one statutory regime: R.C. 3302.03(D) governs the 2021-22 school year and every year after it, so the stability is not a redesign preserving ranks. verified

Also read by #

• OCG White Paper No. 013 — Does Per-Pupil Spending Track Academic Performance?

Feeds connector #

dew-report-card, source key achievement-district-2425 — the tenth connector, approved in “Report card connector” and the first retrieving an outcome rather than a dollar.