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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Shepherd ES is ranked too low. They had some of the top scores in DC.[/quote]

It's a great school and the scores are very respectable, but they're not better than some of the higher ranked schools. But the methodology, whatever it is, is not based on just scores. HA is right above SWS, Murch, and Brent - all of which have higher scores. I think a lot of the ranking is based on whatever algorithm calculates this:

[i]Reading Performance
A descriptive term reflecting a school's reading/language arts percentage proficiency compared with the percentage U.S. News predicted for it. The predicted value was calculated scientifically based on each school's economic and ethnic diversity and these subgroups' relationship to elementary school reading/language arts proficiency in the state.[/i]

That would also explain why some of the HRCS are lower than many would expect, since they have lower scores overall and bigger achievement gaps than many of the higher ranked DCPS (but disproportionately higher numbers of high scoring white/higher SES kids, which raises their scores compared to the non-Wilson feeder DCPS).[/quote]

[b]That is just rewarding WOTP and Cap Hill schools for being the whitest. [/b]Shepherd scores higher than about every single school when you compare white/black. Shepherd has the highest #1 in white student performance as well as top 3 for black. That is way more than respectable, it’s downright amazing. So if you compare for peer performance, I don’t see how you don’t rank Shepherd as top 3 if not #1.

-no dog in fight[/quote]

No dog in this fight?  Obviously, you have a kid at Shepherd.

According to the latest PARCC scores, 40-50% of Shepherd kids score below grade level in math and ELA.  In comparison, the numbers at Ross are much, much better (only a few kids are just below grade level).

In addition, Ross, the #1 school, is EOTP and majority non-white.

Maybe get your facts straight before posting?

[/quote]

No, I don’t. I am a black mom that carefully examines scores of black students around the city.

Again, you are looking at raw numbers. 
Using DC school report card usage of normalizing scores for demographics,

Shepherd: 
White students 96.24%
Black students 73.49%

Ross:
White students: 59.80%
Black students: 66.53%

Janney:
White students: 61%
Black students: 79.72%

Lafayette:
White students: 59.32%
Black: 76.86%

[/quote]

DCPS has actually never explained exactly how these scores are calculated and they appear to make little sense/do not actually relate directly to performance on the tests even for the subgroups, so I wouldn't hang my hat on these numbers more than whichever ones USNWR makes up using similarly motivated but different methodology. If you actually looked at the raw scores for each racial group, then you could brag about both white & black kids scoring better at Shepherd (which may very well be true, I have no idea), but these scores have some kind of weird/unexplained growth metric baked in.

In general, the OSSE report super rewarded schools that had improved test performance from year 1 of the report to year 2 and savaged schools that went down slightly from year 1 to year 2 even if from year 0 to year 2 those schools had more improvement. (So, e.g., if a school went from 1 to 6 to 5, they did *much* worse than the school who went from 1 to 2 to 4, even though the kids actually had more improvement overall at the second school. Assigning that much value to one year change v 3-4 year changes is really stupid and totally contrary to how schools actually teach. It also means the scores are highly variable from year to year in a really unhelpful way if you're actually trying to evaluate school performance.[/quote]

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