NAEP has some cities broken out too, called the TUDA - trial urban district assessment.

DC is among them and is near, but not at the bottom - Detroit has that honor.

Whites are still at the top.

In short- LT is not closing any time soon.

Regardless the school is performing better than the majority of DCPS. If the bar is raised to godawful, which it is in the District, the schools receiving scores that are just regular awful are not going anywhere.

Is there really much difference in how the FARM kids are testing at the various Hill schools (excluding Amidon, unmitigated disaster)? What do the scores really tell us, other than than some schools have a lot more upper-middle-class kids and/or more poor kids in the upper elementary grades than others.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but 1/3 - 1/2 the white kids score advanced in 3rd grade everywhere they land, right, but only a tiny fraction of the blacks (0-6%). The white kids do a bit better at Watkins, and the black kids at Brent, where a good number come from military families/Bollilng Air Force base. There haven't been any white kids testing yet at Payne, Miner, or Ludlow-Taylor and this is the first year that any will have taken the test at Tyler SI and Maury. Is that right?

The DC school profiles used to break the scores down to show exact numbers of test takers by grade and race, but seemed to have stopped doing that several months ago. Wonder why.

Ward Six 2011 DC CAS Scores

Brent – 69% proficient (60/87 students)
Watkins – 63% proficient (134/212 students)
JO Wilson – 53% proficient (63/119 students)
Ludlow Taylor – 50% proficient (41/82 students)
Maury – 42% proficient (27/64 students)
Miner – 36% proficient (57/158 students)
Payne – 33% proficient (32/96 students)
Tyler – 28% proficient (31/112 students)
Amidon – 17% proficient (24/142 students)

Anonymous wrote:Interesting. Nevertheless you have to be careful comparing a state's scores with a city's scores. I would be more convinced by this if you found this difference between another major city and DC. Have you seen any info about other cities?

Unfortunately, NAEP doesn't break its stats down by city. You have to dive into think tank reports, e.g. Cato, Heritage, Brookings, comparing standardized test results in states/counties/cities to get such info. But it's no secret that black kids in only several cities perform as poorly as DC (and in no city is their overall performance thought to be worse), Detroit, Cleveland, New Orleans.

But what the NAEP stats do point up is a crying need for talented and gifted offerings in a city in which white kids in public school do the best in the country overall, and the black kids do the worst. You simply can't keep most of the white kids in the system after around 3rd grade, unless their parents live in overwhelmingly upper-middle-class enclaves in Upper NW, without TAG programs. You can try mightily, like the charters and several of the Hill schools do, but you will fail which hurts the entire system. I don't know enough about the politics of education in DC to understand why DCPS has been so slow to grasp this fundamental truth. Funds could be allocated with the brightest minority kids accruing the benefit to a great extent than any other group. Rhee did talk speak publically about starting TAG programs, starting with a gifted academy in Ward 8, but was out well before any were funded let alone launched.

Pp here. Thanks for that clarification. I think it's dicey to compare DC to states so even if NAEP doesn't break it down by city it's important to acknowledge that to a certain extent we're talking about different units of analysis.

+1. Obviously.

Interesting. Nevertheless you have to be careful comparing a state's scores with a city's scores. I would be more convinced by this if you found this difference between another major city and DC. Have you seen any info about other cities?

Unfortunately, NAEP doesn't break its stats down by city. You have to dive into think tank reports, e.g. Cato, Heritage, Brookings, comparing standardized test results in states/counties/cities to get such info. But it's no secret that black kids in only several cities perform as poorly as DC (and in no city is their overall performance thought to be worse), Detroit, Cleveland, New Orleans.

But what the NAEP stats do point up is a crying need for talented and gifted offerings in a city in which white kids in public school do the best in the country overall, and the black kids do the worst. You simply can't keep most of the white kids in the system after around 3rd grade, unless their parents live in overwhelmingly upper-middle-class enclaves in Upper NW, without TAG programs. You can try mightily, like the charters and several of the Hill schools do, but you will fail which hurts the entire system. I don't know enough about the politics of education in DC to understand why DCPS has been so slow to grasp this fundamental truth. Funds could be allocated with the brightest minority kids accruing the benefit to a great extent than any other group. Rhee did talk speak publically about starting TAG programs, starting with a gifted academy in Ward 8, but was out well before any were funded let alone launched.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Are individual school NAEP scores available? If so where?

No, it's too bad, they only look at a jurisdiction as a block. But look on their web site for many interesting stats. I was blown away by the size of the DCPS achievement gap between black and white kids despite a decade of reform, a strong indication of how thoroughly upper-middle-class blacks have abandoned the system. In Massachusetts, the highest-performing state, the white kids only score 14% advanced (more than 1/3 in DC). The NAEP results make a strong case for expanding/adding accelerated learning programs on the Hill.

Interesting. Nevertheless you have to be careful comparing a state's scores with a city's scores. I would be more convinced by this if you found this difference between another major city and DC. Have you seen any info about other cities?

DCPS has shown zero appetite for investigating extremely suspect testing gains and erasure rates. A push for a real investigation might be the fastest way to get LT a new principal.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2011-03-27-school-test-table_N.htm

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's certainly been well discussed on the Hill. LT & JO Wilson are always pointed out as the two schools with extremely suspect scores.

Whatever that means - our LT prek 3 yuppie crop doesn't seem to have a clue, but most parents probably weren't planning to stay very long anyway, and now they're off to Peabody. So nobody's been fired over the scandal? No investigation?

Nobody fired, no investigation. No heat from Wells.

As a general rule, parents aren't gong to proclaim, "Hey, this isn't bad daycare for free. But I've got a plan to avoid this not-so-great ES, probably going nowhere in particular." So they sing the "get involved! neighborhood committment is all that matters!" tune to get along to go along, making plans to move, go charter, get into another DCPS Hill school, head to privates, whatever.

Anonymous wrote:It's certainly been well discussed on the Hill. LT & JO Wilson are always pointed out as the two schools with extremely suspect scores.

Whatever that means - our LT prek 3 yuppie crop doesn't seem to have a clue, but most parents probably weren't planning to stay very long anyway, and now they're off to Peabody. So nobody's been fired over the scandal? No investigation?

It's certainly been well discussed on the Hill. LT & JO Wilson are always pointed out as the two schools with extremely suspect scores.

Anonymous wrote:Why haven't we heard about the cheating scandal at LT on CH? All news to me.

Bill Turque/the Post has mentioned it several times. But who else would? The Hill Rag? Wells' office? The LT PTA lst serv? mum's the word.

Why haven't we heard about the cheating scandal at LT on CH? All news to me.