Click here to subscribe today or Login.
Barring some dramatic change in schedule, today’s the day you get the answer to the question “How’s your school doing?”
At least, that’s how it will seem.
The State Department of Education is scheduled to release results from the annual standardized math and reading tests this morning. They are given in grades three through eight, and 11, and the law says results must steadily improve until 100 percent of students score “proficient or better” by 2014.
The state will also release the “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP) report saying which schools met goals this year.
It is a massive data dump, an ocean of numbers with an armada of arcane terms. It usually gets boiled down to whether or not a school met minimum goals, and the goals sound simpler than a pre-school coloring book: A certain percentage of students must score “proficient or better,” a certain percentage must take the test, and schools must have a minimum attendance or graduation rate.
If it were really that simple, reporting it would be a snap. But …
There’s also a mandate that subgroups of students – low-income, minority, special education and English Language Learners – meet those test result goals. There are ways to achieve AYP without actually meeting the test result goals. The state groups grades in making the calculations …
You get the picture.
All students meeting goal unlikely
Comparing results across years creates another minefield. The first year results were released – 2003 – only three grades were tested. More were added gradually. Now, seven grades are tested. That means there are a lot more opportunities to miss the goals because a lot more students are in the mix.
Comparing across years is also hazardous because, as noted, the goals keep getting tougher. In 2002-03, when the system first started, the goal was 35 percent scoring proficient or better in math and 45 percent in reading. This year it’s 56 percent and 63 percent, respectively. Next year it goes up to 67 percent and 72 percent.
This, predictably, has created an interesting phenomenon. Test results can improve, but a school can still fail because they didn’t rise to the new, higher goals. Some quick number crunching shows a distinct trend that, on the surface, looks alarming.
I counted how many schools missed AYP each year in Luzerne, Lackawanna and Wyoming Counties. That’s about 121 schools total, though as noted, not all were in the mix in the early years, and some may have closed or opened since it started.
In 2003, when the first AYP results were released, 37 schools missed the goals in one way or another. Schools scrambled to improve, and succeeded mightily. The next year only five missed AYP … then nine … then 14 … then 27 … then 41.
Does this mean more schools are failing? Not at all. It is more likely test results have improved even as the number of schools meeting goals shrank. The reality is that the dream of all students scoring proficient or better will never be attained, at least not in absolute terms. There will always be students who don’t get there.
That is precisely why the system used to decide if schools meet AYP is so complicated. All the extra rules arose to compensate for reality.
It’s also why, whatever you read today and tomorrow about how your school did, you need to take it with a very large grain of salt. Numbers don’t lie, but incomplete numbers don’t tell the whole truth.