How meaningful are student growth metrics really?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you do not like this metric, you might like the empower DC BOLD schools one. It looks specifically at which schools are doing well in absolute terms with at -risk kids

I'm failing at googling this. Do you have a link?

[Anonymous]

This is a well known fatal flaw in education metrics.

They measure the population at a snapshot in time, ignoring exit/entry flux and out-of-school contributions to growth, not the education and not the individuals' growth.

[Anonymous]

https://www.empowerk12.org/data-dashboard-source/dc-new-school-ratings

[Anonymous]

Please remember that a big flaw in these metrics is that they are measured by a test that has no impact in the student taking it. So a huge component of the score is how much the school talks up the test to students and motivates them to do well. Kids have zero incentive to care about these test minus any outside pressure or external rewards the individual school applies. Obvious a kid that doesn’t actually learn anything won’t grow. But kids who have grown might not show it on the test.

I’ve been a teacher more than one at a high preforming dc school where our growth metrics dipped a year because we got complacent and didn’t focus on motivating students to care about the test. The next year (with no change in academics) our scores popped back up because we added some extra RaRa and incentives to make students perform well on the test.

Students are spending more than 10 hours over 2-3 weeks taking tests that they get no feedback on for 6 months and that have no bearing on their grades or next year’s course/group placements. I’m sometimes shocked students try as hard as they do.