A new web site, SchoolMatters.com, is offering a free, web-based data service that provides comparative information and analysis on public schools, districts, and state education systems.

The site--founded through a $45 million contribution from the Broad Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation--was created by a group known as the National Education Data Partnership, which includes the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), Standard & Poor's School Evaluation Service, Achieve Inc., and CELT Corp.

SchoolMatters builds on, and replaces, an earlier initiative in which the Broad Foundation and S&P also were involved, called SchoolResults.org (see "ED launches $50M new data-management tool"). According to S&P, that web site focused only on NCLB data and was funded with a $50 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education. NCLB-centric information available on SchoolResults is now among the data provided by SchoolMatters, and visitors to SchoolResults are now redirected to the SchoolMatters web site.

SchoolMatters provides users with the kind of in-depth financial, demographic, and performance data that corporations have had about their industries for many years.

At a press conference announcing the release of SchoolMatters, William Cox, managing director of Standard & Poor's School Evaluation Services, said his organization believes that SchoolMatters "has the potential to help guide the education debate in this country by providing a common and transparent platform for education data."

SchoolMatters points out on its web site that, even though per-pupil spending has increased by 50 percent over the past two decades, nearly one-third of public high school students fail to graduate, and two-thirds of all students leave high school unprepared for a four-year college, according to the Manhattan Institute.

Dan Katzir, managing director of the Broad Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving urban public schools through better government, management, and labor relations, said an increasing number of American students are "dropping out [of] or graduating from high school unprepared for work, college, and constructive citizenship."

He said the web site provides "easy access to a much deeper level of information than ever publicly available before" as a way of beginning to address this concern.

The information on the site is meant to educate the public about how schools and districts are performing and help them understand the relationships between performance and investment. SchoolMatters says the ease of access to this information can help educators and policy makers better craft strong educational policies. By providing this information to the general public, SchoolMatters hopes to help parents make more informed decisions that range from "policies they advocate to the schools their children attend."