Reply to What elementary school on The Hill?

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "What elementary school on The Hill? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous] [quote=Anonymous] [quote=Anonymous] [quote=Anonymous]

you do know that SH has a lower percentage of students who are proficient or better in math (and a lower percentage of kids who are advanced in math) than Jefferson, right? In reading, Stuart Hobson has 61% proficient and Jefferson has 45%, so there is admittedly a distinction there.  Jefferson has more than twice the in-bounds percentage of Stuart-Hobson, too. Learndc no longer seems to have the 2014 equity reports posted, but the most recent stats I could find showed a higher median growth percentile at Jefferson than Stuart-Hobson. So I'm not sure that S-H is the only middle school option for kids on the Hill that can provide a "good peer group." Unless you think kids need to be white to be good peers, in which case yes, there are about 40 at Stuart Hobson.  [/quote]

Jefferson is undeniably outperforming SH in student progress.  That likely reflects that the school is meeting the needs of its  students of color in a way that SH is not.  SH has always been fine for advanced students regardless of race, but there is a large performance gap along racial lines.  SH is bigger and provides at least some advanced coursework for those capable.  SH (and by extension its feeders) are not meeting the needs a lot of students.[/quote]

The stats don't bear out much of what you're saying. Yes, Jefferson is seeing more progress and meeting the needs of students of color better than SH.  But SH has a smaller percentage of kids who are advanced in math than Jefferson does.  I don't know what each school does for the couple dozen kids in each grade who are advanced in math and/or reading (separate classes? pull outs? in-class enrichment? all of these, if executed well, can be successful) whatever it is, it's working better at Jefferson than at SH.  You can tell this from the median growth percentiles.  Those are in the equity reports available at 
http://osse.dc.gov/node/739452. MGP is a measure of how much kids grow compared to kids throughout the district who had the same starting point.  So a kid who scored in the 25th percentile on last year's CAS is compared to the others who scored at that percentile to see who made more progress, and kids who were at the 90th percentile are compared to each other.  The whole idea is for it to be a way of comparing schools while excluding the fact that kids at some schools come in a lot more prepared than kids at other schools.

The DC average is 50.  Stuart-Hobson's overall MGP was 36 in math and 49 in reading.  Jefferson's overall was 57 in math and 54 in reading. You're right that SH's MGP is especially low for black students and those kids receiving FARMs.  But they are also lower than the DC average for white non-Hispanic students: 47 and 57 for math and reading, compared to DC averages of 59 and 62, respectively.  So even those kids are not progressing particularly well; they just came in higher and stagnated.  [/quote]

No -- the stats do bear what I posted and you should cite current data <http://www.learndc.org/schoolprofiles/view?s=0428#equityreport>

I wasn't using "white" as proxy for advanced.  Not ALL of the white kids at SH are advanced, and one can safely deduce that some of the kids performing lower academically may be just as susceptible to the lack of academic progress as students of color.  As a distinct minority at SH those numbers can be easily skewed.  Plus SH was hit hard by late withdrawals before SY13-14 during BASIS's first year when families could easily double enroll and not show up for the beginning of one school.  They scrambled to fill seats by cut day.[/quote]

The equity reports were not on learndc this morning and I emailed them.  Glad they've been reposted. However, SH's dropped from 2012-3 to 2013-4 in every category in math and reading (except it stayed the same in females' reading MGP). They are below the DC average in every demographic category for math, though they are doing better in reading.  I don't think there's any way you can use published statistics to show that SH is doing well compared to other schools in DC for kids who come in with high CAS scores.  [/quote]

Taking a single year growth scores for any school is not terribly relevant.  there are <40 white kids at SH.  Even a small variation would have major implications on overall scores.  That barely even meets the threshold for reporting as the results have implications on privacy.  That's correct that there's a disconnect between 'holding serve' on reading (at best) and a drop in math

Published stats would only tell so much of a story anywhere.  There's a reason Jefferson has > 50% lower enrollment than SH which is mostly OOB while Jefferson is under-enrolled and in an under-utilized building.[/quote]

Of course there is.  In fact, I think there are two reasons.

a) parents on the Hill don't want their kids to commute to Jefferson.
b) parents see that there are a couple dozen white kids at SH and feel more comfortable.

We have school choice in DC. People are free to use whatever criteria they want to make their choices. But if their criteria include proficiency and progress scores, and they're able to accurately interpret those stats, they might consider Jefferson.  The teachers, principal, and kids seem just as nice there as the other middle schools I've visited. 
[/quote]

Jefferson It's an inappropriate feed for a neighborhood school because it's in an entirely different neighborhood. That's the reason.  Don't assume SH is that attractive to Hill families, all 30 odd white kids and all.  It's attractive for its potential to be a neighborhood school, something Jefferson will never reach from its Hill feeders.  Neither are terribly high on any Hill family's list of optimal choices.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics