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[quote=SAM2]I'm sure every school is different in how it releases ERB data.  But my understanding is that almost all schools give each student's parents a report on how their child scored on the ERB.  The report will show how the child scored against various national norms, and often against the independent school norms.  The ERB people have a list online of the various norms they routinely calculate for schools, and also indicate they can calculate local norms (for a fee, I assume).  http://erblearn.org/schools/collaboration/quality-assessment/norms-and-scoring  If you search online, you can find examples of the types of reports that schools will give.  I think some schools will have presentations for parents, to explain how the reports are read, what they say about the school, and what they say about how your individual child is doing in school. 
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/108665105/The-ERBs_-The-Tests-That-Ate-the-School  
http://issuu.com/columbusschoolforgirls/docs/erb_testing_slide_show_for_web
http://www.easthampton.k12.ny.us/PUB/CTPIII.pdf

From what I understand, most independent schools are pretty forthcoming with their students' parents about the ERB results.  I gather many schools will not readily disclose information about how each individual child's ERB scores compare against the rest of her class, since that smacks of class ranking.  However, I know that Beauvoir will disclose ERB results for all its students applying to NCS and StA, so I assume those schools can easily engage in a "class rank" analysis.  https://www.beauvoirschool.org/ftpimages/224/download/Timeline%20for%202013%20Outplacement.pdf  I'm not sure what other local schools require/disclose ERB results as part of the admissions process.

If there's any lack of transparency, it's that most schools don't seem to commonly circulate their school-wide ERB results to people who are not associated with the school.  I'm not sure why that is.  I could imagine some schools wanting to brag about their students' high ERB scores, to show they compare favorably with other school options.  I can find a couple of examples of that online. http://www.powhatanschool.org/powhatan-news/powhatan-school-ranks-in-top-97th-percentile-in-vocabulary-erb-scores-released/  But such releases seem to be the exception.  I'd guess it's because comparing different schools' ERB scores seems to be a pretty obsessive and perhaps short-sighted way of picking a school, and most independent schools seem to want to deter such inter-school competitiveness.  Also, as some PP pointed out, if schools start engaging in admissions competitions over ERB scores, then the logical result is that schools will begin putting more focus on teaching to the ERB, which could piss off many current parents.

I suspect there might be some interesting broad based comparisons available somewhere of how different localities and school types compare on the ERB.  But I don't have time or interest to look for those right now.  If someone else is motivated, please post the results here.

HTH[/quote]

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