The School District of
Palm Beach County

School Names

School Numbers

The Gold Report was originally conceived in the early 1990s as a response to a request by the then Assistant Palm Beach County School Superintendent Dr. Harvey Goldman to provide a one-page document or each school in the district containing all relevant data regarding behavior, demographic makeup, and achievement on assessments. Even condensing the data to the greatest degree possible, the reports never quite made it under 3 pages, but they were pages packed with all the information available to give an overall picture as to how well each Palm Beach County school was meeting the expectations of the community.

Originally the report as intended to be generated at the end of each 9 week periods during the school year, but on finding much of the data to be redundant due to the testing schedule the reports were issued at the end of the first nine weeks (usually made available in November) and then again at the end of the year (usually in July). Each report covers a 5 year time span so that even in years when technical difficulties or evolving standards precluded a proper report, the bulk of the needed data was provided in years following. At the time of the Gold Report was initiated the only tests reported were the Florida Writing Test and the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS).

Later the results from all the standards-based and criterion-reference tests were added, in some cases replacing earlier discontinued tests. The format of the report attempted to provide rectangular reading areas giving a full, demographically collated picture of each element reported. The counts are provided along with the percentages to enable proper statistical analysis.

When the FCAT test was added in 1999, the reports began to suppress data for student groups of less than 6 students in keeping with The Family Educational Rights and Privacy originally a function of the Department of Research and Evaluation, was compiled by the Educational Data Warehouse beginning in 2014. The data contained in these reports spans more than two decades, beginning in 1993, and extending to present day.

* Note – ELL Students were those actively enrolled in ESOL classes (classified LY).