Reply to Latin replication pulled from PCSB agenda

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Just FYI - the testimony re at risk kids and the PMF — was presented by a Ten Square charter school consultant who was advocating that the PMF be changed. [/quote]

The testimony re PMF and at-risk students. I can't find the chart she referenced, which included the BASIS data referenced by PP.

Alexandra Pardo from TenSquare Consulting re the at-risk student bias of the PMF.

"First, I want to recognize PCSBs staff and leadership ongoing willingness to revise the PMF focused on high standards for student outcomes. In recent years, PCSB has analyzed and recognized the increasingly problematic relationship between student at-risk status and school score on the PMF. Over ten years ago, when the PMF was first developed the sector was grossly different. The correlation between economically disadvantaged students and the PMF score was .13 – negligible.

To best illustrate the shift in economic concentration of students, I direct you to page 1 – here you can see moving across the horizontal axis the number of schools above the 50th percentile based on economic indicators measured at these times – in 2010 there were only 6 schools serving fewer than 50% economically disadvantaged students. Today there are 35 schools serving at-risk populations at the 50th percentile or below. As you see on page 2 – the correlation between economics and the PMF has risen from 2011 to 2018 from .13 to .42, a three-fold increase.

To demonstrate the impact of the at-risk bias, we re-ran the middle school PMF scores for only at-risk students in middle schools. In other words, what could PMF scores be for schools with low or high at-risk populations if only those students were factored? What you will see on page 3 is stark – some high performing schools have low at-risk populations. Schools with PMF scores in the 60s and 70s drop by 20 to 30 PMF points if only considering the outcomes of at-risk students.

We can only suspect where PMF sores would be if schools at the top of this list served at-risk population more aligned with sector or state averages. While this is not a perfect exercise, it demonstrates how sub-groups performances of students can be overlooked. While the proposals to the PMF are a step towards reducing this bias, and I support these shifts, this is not a solution. Members of the task force have suggested alternatives over the past two years – most recently an equity provision. Economics impacts student outcomes has been rooted in research and most recently adopted by even the College Board in the new SAT hardship metric. I urge the Board to be bold like the College Board. Recognize that the changes before you – while a start – are not a solution and are simply a marginal reduction to the growing bias. I ask that the Board commit to mechanisms that reduce this bias to below .20, a statistically weak relationship and develop a PMF 2.0 by spring of 2020. Without action, we will find ourselves here again next year moving decimals without resolving for the underlying bias."

[/quote]

This is great stuff from Pardo- she is a really thoughtful person who was the executive director at Thurgood Marshall.  It's great because it's a simple test- are the PMF results too closely correlated with SES of the students?  Recraft it to de-link those two, so you can get a broader picture of how schools are doing with the entire range of their students.  The simplest way to do this would probably be to reduce the emphasis on testing levels and put almost all the weight on Median Growth Percentile.[/quote]

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