Anonymous wrote:That greatschools ranking (a 7) is based on the school's performance on the state assessment and the federal No Child Left Behind rules on AYP. Under federal AYP rules, a school can perform on the proficient or advanced level for all but one of its disaggregated subgroups, but fail to make AYP because of one subgroup (in the case of Burning Tree the special ed subgroup). In other words, a school could be great in general, but poor performance by one subgroup could pull the whole school's ranking/AYP score down. This hits schools with special ed centers like Burning Tree particularly hard, and/or schools with small subgroups (for example, a school with a small subgroup of 10 disaggregated kids could pull the whole school down if 3 children in that subgroup did not perform well). You can get more specific information about a school's performance here:
http://www.mdreportcard.org (this is particularly helpful if you want to see how many kids are performing at the advanced level which greatschools does not capture -- granted this mdreportcard site is not particularly user-friendly but it has a lot of good info). Also, for what it is worth, the Wash Post ran a story yesterday on how a subgroup can pull down the ranking of a school (in this case North Chevy Chase)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/26/AR2011012606752.html I hope this helps.