Why some scores say “N/A,” not 0

When you browse a school profile, you’ll sometimes see a student group marked “N/A — withheld for privacy, not zero” instead of a percentage. That label is doing important work, and it’s worth a minute to understand.

Small groups are hidden on purpose

State and federal rules require that data be suppressed when a group is small enough that a published number could identify an individual student. If only a handful of students with disabilities took a test at a given school, reporting “33% proficient” could effectively reveal one child’s result. So the figure is withheld.

The trouble starts when a withheld value gets stored as a 0 somewhere upstream. A reader then sees “0% proficient” and concludes a group is failing catastrophically — when in fact there’s no public number at all.

What we do about it

Wherever a value is privacy-suppressed, we render it as N/A and break the trend line, rather than plotting a misleading zero. In the cross-school gap views, schools where one of the two groups is suppressed are excluded from the ranking — and we tell you how many were left out.

It’s a small design choice with a big consequence: a school serving very few students in a category shouldn’t look like it’s failing them just because the law protects those students’ privacy.