The Indianapolis public schools do a good job at making data available to the public

Jennifer writes,

You may want to check out the website for the Indianapolis Public Schools. It has several nice features. They have school and district report cards online. Also if you are looking at a school “snapshot” there is an interesting section called “Delve deeper into the data” which allows the user to do several things, one of which is to compare this school to similar schools where the user can define what characteristics to use when defining similarity (about a dozen characteristics including: number of students, avg % passing their standardized tests, attendance rates, schedule time, grade span, ethnic composition, % free lunch and several others including things like “school improvement models”). It might be a nice model for things we are working towards.

Here’s an example (for the “George Washington Carver School”). I hate the pie chart and 3-D bar charts (of course), but they do allow access to quite a bit of data as well as comparisons such as here. It makes me realize how little information is available from Columbia (or other universities).