Reply to DC's School Report Cards are up. Any surprises?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There's something screwy with the data or the  data is not actually just showing overall achievement/growth, but is somehow being measured relative to population/emphasizing the performance of certain subpopulations. If this is true, so that even achievement is not actually measuring achievement, then this Report Card is really not terribly valuable for UMC parents.

Here's an example:

L-T is at 70.3 for approaching, meets, exceeds for math.

L-T is at 52.6 for meets, exceeds for math.

Watkins is at 65.9 for approaching, meets, exceeds for math.

Watkins is at 37.3 for meets, exceeds for math.

So, L-T is a little better for approaching meets, exceeds for math (4.4% better) and considerably better for meets, exceeds (15.3% better). If I were a UMC parent looking for a cohort of high performers, L-T clearly has a much bigger one.

However, when you then look at the scores the Report Card assigns that go to the overall rating, L-T gets a 2.4 for approaching meets, exceeds for math and Watkins gets a 3.9. So Watkins does a little worse and gets more than 50% higher. That seems... wrong. But then we get to meets, exceeds, where L-T was MUCH better... and we see L-T get a 5.5 and Watkins get a 7.7! So despite L-T having a noticeably higher pass rate, Watkins gets nearly a 50% higher score again.

It's also not some fluke of distribution being counted somehow, because for Watkins:
ELA: 8% 5s and 19% 1s.
Math: 10% 5s and 15% 1s.

For L-T:
ELA: 28% 5s (!) and 11% 1s.
Math: 16% 5s and 17% 1s.

So, at most, L-T has slightly more 1s in math; but way fewer 1s in ELA and WAY more 5s.

L-T does much better in ELA and does a bit better on points, so that at least makes sense.

Then let's look at growth... Raw numbers wise, the two schools appear to perform similarly, but somehow Watkins ends up with 34 points and L-T 27.1. The most perplexing one is median growth percentile for ELA, where L-T gets 62nd percentile, which gets them 8 points; meanwhile, Watkins gets 57th percentile, which gets them 8.6 points. WHAT? Can anyone makes sense of this?

At the end of the day, L-T has clearly better actual achievement numbers (especially in ELA, where they aren't close) and the schools have very similar growth and absentee numbers. L-T has more kids entering than exiting; Watkins has the reverse. The soft percentage factors I take it don't really count, but they are similar for the schools too... except that L-T is notably better in sense of belonging (76 v 69) and WAY better in safety (62 v 45). Everything else is within 1 point either way; 2 to L-T and 1 to Watkins.

And then we get to the overall scores and Watkins is at 76% and L-T is at 59%... even though the raw numbers clearly give L-T an advantage in achievement and basically a draw in everything else.

How is this possible? Does that mean that the "scores" we're seeing for achievement and growth are actually themselves relative in some totally unexplained way? Or some subpopulation scores are counting more? Because that makes this pretty useless for a family trying to use these Report Cards to make decisions.[/quote]

Looking at other Hill schools for ELA growth, it appears the points only loosely track the identical reported measure. How bizarre. And it can't be adjusted for at-risk population, because Payne is a T1 that gets basically 1/2 as many points as Maury for only 3% worse! And CHML is poorer than Maury and gets 1.7 points less for the same score.

Brent: ELA median growth percentile = 70% = 10.9 points
SWS: ELA median growth percentile = 69% = 11.6 points
L-T: ELA median growth percentile = 62% = 8 points
Watkins: ELA median growth percentile = 57% = 8.6 points
Maury: ELA median growth percentile = 54% = 8.5 points
CHML: ELA median growth percentile = 54% = 6.8 points
Payne: ELA median growth percentile = 51% = 4.2 points[/quote]

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