Anonymous wrote:5 Star Elementary

Eaton Elementary School
Hyde-Addison Elementary School
Janney Elementary School
Mann Elementary School
Marie Reed Elementary School
Maury Elementary School
Oyster-Adams Bilingual School
SWS
Washington Yu Ying

Oyster isn’t a five star school it’s a 4. The middle school, Adams, is a 5 star school.

Anonymous wrote:I think the value of growth, verses proficiency, totally depends on the child.

In many DC schools, there is a large population of ELL students. They may be new to the country, new to the language, etc. They may have interrupted education. They may have no family at home speaking English. For these students, growth is a much clearer indicator than proficiency. It may take them 5 years to move up to "proficient" but that doesn't mean that they aren't making meaningful progress- or that the school isn't doing its job. The job of educating these types of students is just completely different from educating a student in an English proficient household. And yet, these student are expected to show proficiency on the same test.

That being said, for an English proficient student, growth might not be as important of an indicator, and actual proficiency might be more telling.

They may also be ELs from the embassys such as at Deal so skews their ELL ratings, but parse it down by race and income and not quite so rosy on the PARCC. ELLs not one big homogeneous group!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There were literally dozens of public meetings with parents and experts debating the relative weighting of proficiency vs growth.

OSSE's first proposed rating didn't weight growth more than proficiency, and they changed it based on overwhelming feedback from most people who bothered to show up.

That doesn't surprise me. I'm sure the universe of people who knew both that the meetings were happening and the issues actually being discussed was quite small.

It's the classic conundrum of special interests versus the common good overlaid with lots of jargon/terms of art.

+1

I had no idea they were happening, and if I had, I would not have been able to attend an in-person set of meetings of unclear benefit to my family.

This is just like how our school added this February break supposedly based on parent demand, but failed to note that the respondents themselves to the survey were a special interest group of their own. This is not satisfying common interests nor is it somehow "democratic".

First time hearing this (although I like the two breaks). Who were they?

I'm just saying that there is a greater motivation to respond to the survey to create change in the status quo, than to respond based on liking status quo. So the special interest group is those parents who wanted the Feb break. It is just like in Yelp when almost all reviews are either glowing or damning. You have to be pretty motivated.

And in this case, it's those parents who want growth measured more highly than proficiency.

And in other situations it's just whoever shows up to the ANC (ahem, old retired people with no kids in the system) meeting and yammers on about something long enough. For instance.

I know this is off topic and I may be misremembering but I don't think the February break was even an option on the survey. But I hear you on not being able to attend even if I knew when the meeting was - stuff always seems to happen. I think it'd be interesting if they had more forums online/as a call-in/etc.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There were literally dozens of public meetings with parents and experts debating the relative weighting of proficiency vs growth.

OSSE's first proposed rating didn't weight growth more than proficiency, and they changed it based on overwhelming feedback from most people who bothered to show up.

That doesn't surprise me. I'm sure the universe of people who knew both that the meetings were happening and the issues actually being discussed was quite small.

It's the classic conundrum of special interests versus the common good overlaid with lots of jargon/terms of art.

+1

I had no idea they were happening, and if I had, I would not have been able to attend an in-person set of meetings of unclear benefit to my family.

This is just like how our school added this February break supposedly based on parent demand, but failed to note that the respondents themselves to the survey were a special interest group of their own. This is not satisfying common interests nor is it somehow "democratic".

First time hearing this (although I like the two breaks). Who were they?

I'm just saying that there is a greater motivation to respond to the survey to create change in the status quo, than to respond based on liking status quo. So the special interest group is those parents who wanted the Feb break. It is just like in Yelp when almost all reviews are either glowing or damning. You have to be pretty motivated.

And in this case, it's those parents who want growth measured more highly than proficiency.

And in other situations it's just whoever shows up to the ANC (ahem, old retired people with no kids in the system) meeting and yammers on about something long enough. For instance.

I know this is off topic and I may be misremembering but I don't think the February break was even an option on the survey. But I hear you on not being able to attend even if I knew when the meeting was - stuff always seems to happen. I think it'd be interesting if they had more forums online/as a call-in/etc.

Anonymous wrote:I think the value of growth, verses proficiency, totally depends on the child.

In many DC schools, there is a large population of ELL students. They may be new to the country, new to the language, etc. They may have interrupted education. They may have no family at home speaking English. For these students, growth is a much clearer indicator than proficiency. It may take them 5 years to move up to "proficient" but that doesn't mean that they aren't making meaningful progress- or that the school isn't doing its job. The job of educating these types of students is just completely different from educating a student in an English proficient household. And yet, these student are expected to show proficiency on the same test.

That being said, for an English proficient student, growth might not be as important of an indicator, and actual proficiency might be more telling.

Yes. It seems to me that for kids scoring proficient, 4 or 5, the problem with growth is that it's relative to other scorers of the same. So, they take all kids scoring a 4 (and I am hoping it's more specific to a subscore but maybe not) and seeing how many will get a 5 next year. Say 10% move up from a 4 to a 5. Those kids have shown high "growth" relative to the other 4 scorers. But, as a parent, you might think the school is doing just fine so long as their child doesn't go from a 4 to a 3. The school might as well. In this situation you may have a very slight distinction, really, in school quality - so what if a few kids (literally - maybe 3) in your school got a 4 on PARCC Math in grade 3 and a 5 in grade 4 the following year? Isn't it more important that you've got 20% of grade 3 scoring a 4+ ?

On the other hand, if you have a kid scoring a 2 - a lot of kids scoring 2 - in grade 3, and then you get quite a few of them up to a 3 the following year - you're doing very well for those kids. But for that parent whose kid already has a 4, and maintained it - but they are the only 4 in the whole grade - is that a good school?

So here we are back to the major challenge of having a scoring system that does account for every kid but the 2 and 4 scoring kid. I guess this might be the best we could do, but you may still want to look more at the overall proficiency scores at your school rather than these stars. I was concerned our school had ZERO kids scoring 5 on the PARCC last year in Math. That's a detail which would get lost in all these rankings, quite easily. If you are not a data nerd you are probably way lost already.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There were literally dozens of public meetings with parents and experts debating the relative weighting of proficiency vs growth.

OSSE's first proposed rating didn't weight growth more than proficiency, and they changed it based on overwhelming feedback from most people who bothered to show up.

That doesn't surprise me. I'm sure the universe of people who knew both that the meetings were happening and the issues actually being discussed was quite small.

It's the classic conundrum of special interests versus the common good overlaid with lots of jargon/terms of art.

+1

I had no idea they were happening, and if I had, I would not have been able to attend an in-person set of meetings of unclear benefit to my family.

This is just like how our school added this February break supposedly based on parent demand, but failed to note that the respondents themselves to the survey were a special interest group of their own. This is not satisfying common interests nor is it somehow "democratic".

First time hearing this (although I like the two breaks). Who were they?

I'm just saying that there is a greater motivation to respond to the survey to create change in the status quo, than to respond based on liking status quo. So the special interest group is those parents who wanted the Feb break. It is just like in Yelp when almost all reviews are either glowing or damning. You have to be pretty motivated.

And in this case, it's those parents who want growth measured more highly than proficiency.

And in other situations it's just whoever shows up to the ANC (ahem, old retired people with no kids in the system) meeting and yammers on about something long enough. For instance.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There were literally dozens of public meetings with parents and experts debating the relative weighting of proficiency vs growth.

OSSE's first proposed rating didn't weight growth more than proficiency, and they changed it based on overwhelming feedback from most people who bothered to show up.

That doesn't surprise me. I'm sure the universe of people who knew both that the meetings were happening and the issues actually being discussed was quite small.

It's the classic conundrum of special interests versus the common good overlaid with lots of jargon/terms of art.

+1

I had no idea they were happening, and if I had, I would not have been able to attend an in-person set of meetings of unclear benefit to my family.

This is just like how our school added this February break supposedly based on parent demand, but failed to note that the respondents themselves to the survey were a special interest group of their own. This is not satisfying common interests nor is it somehow "democratic".

First time hearing this (although I like the two breaks). Who were they?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There were literally dozens of public meetings with parents and experts debating the relative weighting of proficiency vs growth.

OSSE's first proposed rating didn't weight growth more than proficiency, and they changed it based on overwhelming feedback from most people who bothered to show up.

That doesn't surprise me. I'm sure the universe of people who knew both that the meetings were happening and the issues actually being discussed was quite small.

It's the classic conundrum of special interests versus the common good overlaid with lots of jargon/terms of art.

+1

I had no idea they were happening, and if I had, I would not have been able to attend an in-person set of meetings of unclear benefit to my family.

This is just like how our school added this February break supposedly based on parent demand, but failed to note that the respondents themselves to the survey were a special interest group of their own. This is not satisfying common interests nor is it somehow "democratic".

I think the value of growth, verses proficiency, totally depends on the child.

In many DC schools, there is a large population of ELL students. They may be new to the country, new to the language, etc. They may have interrupted education. They may have no family at home speaking English. For these students, growth is a much clearer indicator than proficiency. It may take them 5 years to move up to "proficient" but that doesn't mean that they aren't making meaningful progress- or that the school isn't doing its job. The job of educating these types of students is just completely different from educating a student in an English proficient household. And yet, these student are expected to show proficiency on the same test.

That being said, for an English proficient student, growth might not be as important of an indicator, and actual proficiency might be more telling.

That's the problem with tying growth directly to proficiency. Accurately measuring growth requires a much more difficult achievement test (to push the upper bound way out). This would then lead to vastly lower superficial scores and create outrage and pearl clutching even though nothing would have changed.

Proficiency on the other hand is a straight forward base all should achieve. It has limited value (since we hopefully have higher goals) but what value it does have is pure and unadulterated.

Unfortunately, imo, a focus on growth to proficiency inevitably promotes mediocrity. Growth is a better hypothetical metric, but, the necessary horse trading of a broader system distorts its value.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Question - for students who received 5s on PARCC for 2 years running, is their score penalized for growth?

Not the final number but growth on scores within range for that number.

The student is not penalized but the school is disadvantaged, on its report card, because growth is more difficult and there is less room for it (since it is constrained by the upper boundary).

So, I haven’t done a deep dive into this ranking, but on lots of national rankings, a 5-to-5 scoring child is excluded from the growth scoring rather than treated as no growth. It’s not perfect, but it solves part of the problem.

Given that almost all 5 star schools come from among the usual suspects (i.e., schools that also have very high proficiency), it’s hard to say growth is getting overemphasized to the exclusion of proficiency at the top end. Marie Reed is the only school in the 5 star category that I find remotely surprising and I assume that’s just my ignorance and/or their growth is *that* good. Like, Brent and Ross parents can bitch all they want, but ultimately Maury and Janney are two of the top scoring schools in the city by either proficiency or this ranking, so obviously it’s not like objectively highly proficient student bodies can’t max out these rankings too.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Question - for students who received 5s on PARCC for 2 years running, is their score penalized for growth?

Not the final number but growth on scores within range for that number.

The student is not penalized but the school is disadvantaged, on its report card, because growth is more difficult and there is less room for it (since it is constrained by the upper boundary).

So, I haven’t done a deep dive into this ranking, but on lots of national rankings, a 5-to-5 scoring child is excluded from the growth scoring rather than treated as no growth. It’s not perfect, but it solves part of the problem.

Every time proficiency vs growth is discussed I am reminded of the hilariously awful exchange between Betsy DeVos and Sen Al Franken at her confirmation hearing. He was trying to get her to weigh in on which was more important. And she seemed to not know what the terms meant or about the debate around it. Sigh.

http://time.com/4637642/betsy-devos-confirmation-education-policy/

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Question - for students who received 5s on PARCC for 2 years running, is their score penalized for growth?

Not the final number but growth on scores within range for that number.

The student is not penalized but the school is disadvantaged, on its report card, because growth is more difficult and there is less room for it (since it is constrained by the upper boundary).