Reply to Brent, Maury & Watkins Trend-lines

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Comparing AYP between schools is fraught with all kinds of caveats:
1) Although these are of course standardized tests and despite efforts to make sure every school administers them in the same manner, there are often significant differences between schools, for example in how they approach special ed children to be tested. Some schools have relied more heavily on portfolios than others, the latter score lower as a result. And some just have more declared special ed children. 
2) Also to be kept in mind very much, is that some of these schools have very few actual numbers the tests rely on, simply because the testing grades (3, 4, 5) are small and few. The results are therefore volatile, making trends difficult to interpret. 
3)[b] Add a little school choice to that, with sometimes a significant number of children returning from poorly run charters or leaving to other destinations, the trends aren't even trends about schools but simply about year-to-year student composition. [/b]Given the low numbers of testers in some of the hill schools, you can see scores move up and down based on just a hand full of particularly good or particularly bad students. The same goes for a random teacher turn-over or two.
4) Oh yes, and let's not forget that the AYP% is about the roughest measure anyone could have come up with (as it's the total of those in the 3rd and 4th quartile). Say, someone scores 375 in reading, whereby the span of what's called "proficient runs from 343 to 375, that student is declared "proficient". The one scoring 376 is declared "advanced". If a school has a lot of kids on those cut-offs, especially when they're between what's called "basic" (2nd quartile) and "proficient" (3rd quartile), then a school's scores can go from "made it" to "didn't make it" with just a few strokes of a pen.
5) Not to mention that test scores in elementary schools do not reflect the current status but past successes and failures (when those kids were in K, 1st, 2nd etc.).

Beyond these caveats, what you're looking at is essentially a correlation between the % of students from socio-economically weaker backgrounds and that really rough AYP %. What's interesting if you care to look a little more deeply (and you'll have to do a little calculations yourself because the scores for groups that are two small will not be reported), then you'll see that socio-economically well off (esp. white) children, will likely score well no matter the context. By contrast, the average less well-off child will score better in an environment that has fewer than about 50% of economically challenged children. This applies to all the three schools that are listed at the outset of this thread. And what that composition looks like at any given grade level is as much a factor of a particular neighborhood as it is of a school's year-to-year history. For example, in the late 1990s and early 2000, Maury attracted economically well of children from all over the city, then hit a leadership road-bump in about 2000, which subsequently left it with but the comparatively poorer neighborhood children and the very real prospect of a school closure. I'm sure you can look back at Brent and maybe to a lesser extent Watkins, which has seen more continuity and also has a much bigger and less volatile body of testing students, and see similar random impacts on its student body. In the early 2000, all three mentioned here suffered from the head-start charter schools got in dipping into the educationally involved parent pool by enrolling 3 year-olds while DCPS continued to only take them at age 4 for a few more years.

So now that you're probably left scratching your head to know what to do with the data, especially if you were hoping to draw any conclusions about choosing schools, let me say that there is really no way around going to check things out first hand in those grades. And what you may find is that they're really very similar and all really quite good. They've all been doing well, especially if you focus your attention on the average child from an socio-economically well off (and often educationally involved) background and children who've been with that one and the same school for years, something that unfortunately the AYP scores say little about.[/quote]

Hi Gina Arlotto.

For everyone else?  I wouldn't worry about the highly educated and involved Hill parents who've not only chosen to leave, but then (despite their high expectations) somehow blundered into poorly run charters, and THEN decided the remedy was to return to their unsatisfactory DCPS.  If there's a sample size of such students to be counted on more than one hand, it would be shocking.  :roll:

Families leave.  The better-off they are, the earlier they go.  This opens up lots of seats for poorly-served OOB students.  The later the grade, the more seats that are open.  The more seats that are open, the poorer the results in the testing grades.  It's a difficult cycle to break.[/quote]

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