The new assessment and accountability data for the 2012-13 school year has been released, and the amount of material available is truly massive.

I’ll be analyzing this for some time to come, but I wanted interested readers to know how to access some of this information now, including what I consider a good shortcut to look at an individual school’s performance.

The place to start is the Kentucky Department of Education’s “School Report Card” web page.

From this page, you can access report card information for the entire state, your local school district, or your child’s school.

You can also access a massive number of Excel spreadsheets with the “Data Sets” tab and a “Glossary” of some of the terms used in the Unbridled Learning accountability program. Those are important tools for serious researchers, but the data contained there is massive.

Most of you are probably interested in data on your school, and you don’t want to look at tons and tons of information. Here’s a shortcut that will let you do that.

First, enter your school’s district and name in the school report card area on this page and then click the “View Card” link.

Next, click the “Assessment” tab near the middle of the page.

Finally, click on the “Printer Friendly Report Card (PDF)” link on the left side of the new page (Note, the “Printer Friendly Report Card (PDF)” link also appears on other pages, but may not be functional on those other pages. It will work from the “Assessment” tab).

This will bring up a printable PDF document with the data on your child’s school, including overall Unbridled Learning classifications, whether your school met the AMO and (for high schools) the graduation rate target, along with many other things such as detailed score results broken out by race for each subject tested. The document for each school usually will be a little over 40 pages in length (longer if your school has an unusual number of grades). This is a much more compact presentation of key information than you can find using other features of the School Report Card web site.

Of course, feel free to explore all the tabs in the School Report Card web site, but the PDF is a great place to start and probably has all the information that most of our readers will want to see.

In closing, here is a hat tip to the team at the Kentucky Department of Education that put all of this massive amount of data together. As a data guy myself, I understand how difficult it is to present the data behind our rather complex Unbridled Learning accountability program. They still don’t have everything perfect, but I find them very open and receptive to constructive suggestions on how to improve their data presentation, so if you have an idea on how to improve this even more, let them know. It’s really easy to do, to. Just click on the “Contact Us” tab at the top of the report cards home web page for that information.