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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
GS is doing a comparison of DISPARITIES.  (If I am reading the methodology report correctly - which btw many of you keyboard warriors have clearly not read).  Meaning they are comparing the DISPARITY between groups at your school to the DISPARITY between the same groups at the state level.  Do you even understand this?  You can argue whether or not measuring this disparity gives any meaning to the overall measure of a school.  Instead you're sitting there yelling about "racism." 
[/quote]

From their website, this is what GS says they are doing:

"The Equity Rating is computed based upon the performance of disadvantaged groups and relative size of in-school gaps. These two components allow us to evaluate a school’s success in educating disadvantaged groups compared to students throughout the state, as well as compared specifically to other students at the school."

[b]What they are actually doing is just the second, which means that the HS with the smallest population of disadvantaged students, Langley, has the highest equity score.  Think about that.  It doesn't make sense.[/b][/quote]

Your paragraph doesn't make any sense.  Can you explain?  Are you suggesting that GS is lying about their methodology?[/quote]

DP. PP is wrong in the explanation but gets to right ultimate issue. GS is measuring equity by comparing how traditionally lower-performing groups (such as racial minorities and low-income students) do compared to the overall state population and to the overall school population. Nearly by definition, the least-advantaged students in a school will not perform as well as the more-advantaged students in their school and in their state, so any school with enough lesser-advantaged students to be counted (see the next paragraph on this point) is going to be dinged by GS for the fact that those students don't perform as well, regardless of whether the reasons for that performance difference have anything to do with the school itself. In that regard, it is very significant that GS leaves out one point of comparison -- [i]how racial minority, low-income and disabled students do against their similarly situated peers across the state[/i]. Thus you can have a backwards situation where a very good school has all of its students performing better than the state average for students in their demographic group, and still gets points deducted for factors beyond their control that contribute to a performance discrepancy between groups. If GS also included how minority/low-income/disabled students in the school did compared to similarly situated students across the state, a school that hadn't closed the performance gap but was still doing better by those students than other schools in the state would get a boost from that, but instead it gets dinged based solely on the performance gap.

There is an exception to this methodology, which is that when a school doesn't have at least 5% of their student population fall into a particular group, the statistics for that population don't get included in the GS calculations, and thus no deductions are taken for discrepancies between those students and the rest of the school. It is important to note in this regard that the default is to start out at a 10 for equity and then lose points for discrepancies in performance rather than starting with a 0/1 and then gaining points for demonstrating that your school is closing the performance. Thus, you could have a very white, very affluent school where the white/affluent students perform well above state averages but where the handful of minority/low-income students perform well below state averages (which should be a big red flag for the school), but as long as those black, hispanic, low-income, etc., students each make up less than 5% of the student population, their data won't be included by GS and the school will get top marks for equity (because no deductions for reported performance discrepancies), despite the fact that the schools is clearly worse for racial minorities/low-income students than a school where on average those student groups perform substantially better (and ahead of state averages). [/quote]

Yes, (I'm the PP) I think you are correct generally in your understanding of how they are calculating this new stat.

But I do think many of you need to realize that just the presence of "diversity" in a school is not an automatic deduction to the score; you can either *gain* or *lose* based on how you compare to the state.

I do think the reason so many schools around here are getting their score docked is because there's a big gap, [i]not because the poor students are doing worse, but because the advantaged students are doing very well."  In other words, you can increase a gap by lowering the bottom, or by increasing the top, and the latter is what is happening here.  And punishing schools for this is not warranted.[/quote]

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