Kentucky parents have a new way to hold their school and district leaders accountable through an interactive, web-based tool developed by the state’s Department of Education and the Kentucky Center for Statistics.

On Friday, the state unveiled its new Kentucky School Proficiency Dashboard, which allows for comparing proficiency levels of public schools and school districts using the latest state testing data. The dashboard is available online at kystats.ky.gov/reports.

For Kentucky Education Commissioner Wayne Lewis, the tool is a more striking way to present students’ academic achievement.

“With the test score release back in October, we learned that we have stalled in improving achievement. I believe there is a renewed commitment in Kentucky to raise the bar and close achievement gaps,” Lewis said in a news release Friday. He added that the tool could help better show performance gaps between students of color and poorer students and their more affluent, white peers.

“This interactive tool provides a visual representation of disparities in achievement between groups of students,” he said.

With the dashboard, parents can explore academic overviews, breakdowns of academic performance by race and economic status, and compare schools or even entire districts to one another.

The dashboard highlights the percentage of students scoring proficient or above in each subject area by the elementary, middle and high school levels. To see how their own school is doing, all parents need to do is select it from a drop-down menu.

“The more transparent that school districts can be and schools can be, the better,” Bowling Green Independent School District Superintendent Gary Fields said.

Fields said the state has always had helpful data. What’s changed is that it’s getting better at making that information accessible. State data has also helped his own district make important decisions, he said, such as how to advise high school students based on postsecondary data.

“We have all this great data so any time they can take this and break it down in a way that the general public can understand it, that parents can understand it, I think that’s a positive,” Fields said.

Warren County Public Schools Superintendent Rob Clayton also welcomed the new tool, although he added he hasn’t had the chance to view the dashboard yet.

“Hopefully, parents find it to be an efficient method for gathering performance data about schools and districts,” he said in a text message.

The dashboard is one aspect of the Kentucky Department of Education’s School Report Card.

Under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, which was passed in 2015 and replaced No Child Left Behind, each state was required to create an online school report card as part of its system for evaluating school success.

“We are working hard to ensure that Kentucky parents and educators have great tools available to see and understand the performance of our schools,” Lewis said.