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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think the value of growth, verses proficiency, totally depends on the child.

In many DC schools, there is a large population of ELL students.  They may be new to the country, new to the language, etc. They may have interrupted education.  They may have no family at home speaking English.  For these students, growth is a much clearer indicator than proficiency.  It may take them 5 years to move up to "proficient" but that doesn't mean that they aren't making meaningful progress- or that the school isn't doing its job.  The job of educating these types of students is just completely different from educating a student in an English proficient household.  And yet, these student are expected to show proficiency on the same test.

That being said, for an English proficient student, growth might not be as important of an indicator, and actual proficiency might be more telling.[/quote]

Yes. It seems to me that for kids scoring proficient, 4 or 5, the problem with growth is that it's relative to other scorers of the same. So, they take all kids scoring a 4 (and I am hoping it's more specific to a subscore but maybe not) and seeing how many will get a 5 next year. Say 10% move up from a 4 to a 5. Those kids have shown high "growth" relative to the other 4 scorers. But, as a parent, you might think the school is doing just fine so long as their child doesn't go from a 4 to a 3. The school might as well. In this situation you may have a very slight distinction, really, in school quality - so what if a few kids (literally - maybe 3) in your school got a 4 on PARCC Math in grade 3 and a 5 in grade 4 the following year? Isn't it more important that you've got 20% of grade 3 scoring a 4+ ?

On the other hand, if you have a kid scoring a 2 - a lot of kids scoring 2 - in grade 3, and then you get quite a few of them up to a 3 the following year - you're doing very well for those kids. But for that parent whose kid already has a 4, and maintained it - but they are the only 4 in the whole grade - is that a good school?

So here we are back to the major challenge of having a scoring system that does account for every kid but the 2 and 4 scoring kid. I guess this might be the best we could do, but you may still want to look more at the overall proficiency scores at your school rather than these stars. I was concerned our school had ZERO kids scoring 5 on the PARCC last year in Math. That's a detail which would get lost in all these rankings, quite easily. If you are not a data nerd you are probably way lost already.

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