What’s up with schools that both “grow” and “decline”?
On this year’s School Accountability Reports, there are 33 schools that show improving academic growth, but their ranking – “unsatisfactory,” “low,” “average,” “high” and “excellent” – went down.
This happens because the state uses two different formulas to calculate growth and ranking.
For a school ranking, state officials place students into one of four categories – advanced, proficient, partially proficient and unsatisfactory/no scores – when they take the CSAP tests. Even if a student is at the top of the “partially proficient” category, he or she would be counted the same as the student who is at the bottom of the “partially proficient” category.
Students could technically improve their test scores – but not enough to get bumped up to another category – and the ranking would not change.
Growth is calculated, however, with individual student number scores.
This means students scoring right on the edge between “unsatisfactory” and “partially proficient” could jump into a new category with just a small bump in their number score. The fact that they moved categories may help the “ranking,” but the jump may not be enough to affect the school’s “growth,” since “growth” is calculated with actual number scores.
For a school to make “significant improvement,” there has to be a 15 percent net gain in students who demonstrated measurable academic progress from one year to the next.
– Allison Sherry
