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

Disagree. In a city with so many students at risk, I think having a way to measure student growth across both sectors and by student group is helpful (achievement was available before). I like being able to teacher experience and student retention by subgroup too.

I think it should make people a little more open to their neighborhood elementary schools and a bit more wary of some of the DCUM-favored charters. [/quote]

I agree but I think that is my issue.  From a public policy standpoint it provides decent data on where finite resources should be deployed and helps identifying schools that are slipping.

However, from a parental perspective the weighting of at risk kids, test score growth, and demographic comparables make it less useful for identifying the absolute quality of a particular school. [b] In essence the signal gets lost in the noise.
[/b]
I do think that this makes some of the unfavored neighborhood schools look better, which will help counter the emotional factors driving people away (which is a good public policy goal) but worry that by making some of the favored schools look superficially worse it will have negative consequences.

What will the inevitable gaming of the stars lead to?  In some cases it will lead to beneficial outcomes by encouraging admittance of at risk/disabilities but in others it will do the exact opposite.  If will be interesting to see if there is an explosion of IEPs rolling over into the testing years.[/quote]

Yes. That's what I'm seeing, and also how it feels to me. I'm also not hearing really any buzz about these stars at our (charter) school, as opposed to the Tiers. It seems to have fallen flat as parents do not really know what to make of this mess of numbers.

The extra weighting of at-risk and disabled students, as you said, might make sense from a policy perspective but feels very weird as a parent. And, it might make schools put extra services into these groups (especially disabled) but only around their PARCC scores... I'm not sure if that's ideal. And the stars allow all the other kids to completely fall through the cracks.[/quote]

The weighting system is deeply flawed. Only at-risk and disabled students matter?

I'd understand if some agency for the disabled used this system to assess schools and prioritize budgets, but as a tool to evaluate the general quality of schools it's frankly stupid and probably racist.[/quote]

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