Reply to New Great Schools ratings out and kind of surprising....

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm convinced that greatschools does more harm than good at this point.  Too many people use it as a shorthand way to assess school quality without looking at anything other than the number or knowing how that number is given.   It's a measure of student's average performance on SOLs compared to average performance at other schools in the state - nothing more, nothing less.  To say a school is good or bad based only at that data point is stupid. [/quote]

Being able to pass the SOLs --- which is the basis for the curriculum in the state -- is a measure of how well the curriculum is being taught and being learned by the students.  It does have value.  It may not be the ONLY piece of info that tells whether the teachers are teaching and/or the students are learning.  But it is an objective measurement that can be compared across schools in a state.

These ratings were updated in the last week to reflect the SOLs taken LAST spring.  Before this, the ratings were based on the passrates for the 2014 tests.

To the PP who likes to insult me and demand info at the same time --- go find the info on Woodson yourself, @ss.  Apparently Woodson people are not capable of finding their own info.  [/quote]

But the greatschools number tells you next to nothing about the overall pass rates at the school - it's just a dumbed down percentile ranking.   For example, all schools in the state could have pass rates of between 95 and 99 percent, but some schools will still end up with ratings of 1 or 2 because their pass rate was 95 instead of 99.  Now, I know the gap isn't actually that small statewide, but unless you spend some time digging into the numbers, you won't know.  Having a single number numerical rating discourages people from being analytical and doing research.   An even bigger problem with relying on a percentile ranking is that it tells you nothing about the distribution of test performance at that school.  You could have wide variance is performance of across the board performance similar to the average. Again, you just don't know if you begin and end with a number between 1 and 10 that is applied to the entire school. [/quote]

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