TLDR: Compare school growth with a fun dashboard.
When I last discussed CAASPP scores, I lamented at how lame they are. They are simply measures of proficiency, not growth. And what I proposed was twisting around the data to make a growth score for every school. This method has a lot of flaws, but at least it gives us a glimpse at whether schools are helping students grow. So here we go….
Before you look at the data, some context might help.The method is a bit complex so bare with me. I took each school’s scale score for each grade and found its “Distance from 3”, meaning the distance from proficiency. Then I compared those numbers to the scores that the school got in 2016 for the prior grade. The difference between those numbers is the amount that those students grew from 2016 to 2017. I then ranked all schools in a percentile.
What we get is a grade-by-grade growth dashboard.
As an example, start with the first school alphabetically as a reference point. Academia Moderna had a very strong 4th grade team. They grew more than 86.2% of other schools in 4th grade English. That means that only 13.8% of schools in all of LAUSd grew more.
Conversely, their fifth grade team struggled. They grew more than 11.7% of LAUSD schools in math. That also means that 88.3% of schools grew more than they did in 5th grade math.
High schools are not included because they do not have sequential grades that are tested.
To use the tool below, you can use the slider or drop down menu to switch between schools and see how your school did in each grade level and subject.
For those of you on the email list, click here for the dashboard!
It would be interesting to see this alongside the percentile of the school’s base scale score. High achieving schools could appear all red on growth alone due to lower opportunity/potential for growth, right?