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Home > Blogs > Springfield Schools News and Issues > Archives > 2009 > August > 25
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Springfield maintains “Continuous Improvement” rating
Later tonight/early tomorrow we’ll have capsules on each district up on springfieldnewssun.com and I’ll link to them but for now I’ll go over some highlights on the blog.
Springfield City Schools kept its “Continuous Improvement” rating for the 2008-09 school year.
Early word indicated that Springfield would drop back down to the “Academic Watch” category, making the district’s boundaries eligible for charter school start ups again. Under Ohio law, charter schools can be built in the really big urban areas (Columbus and Dayton for example) any time but not in other districts if they are ranked “Continuous Improvement” or higher.
Springfield picked up one more indicator this year than last (indicators are standards for Ohio Achievement Test proficiency, Ohio Graduation Test proficiency, graduation rate and attendance) for a total of 4 and didn’t meet the Adequate Yearly Progress standards for subgroups of student populations (for racial, economic and ability differences).
Springfield owes its “Continuous Improvement” rating once again to the value-added measure, lobbied for by urban districts and those that serve special populations in higher numbers. Value-added measures a student’s growth of a particular year, with no regard to proficiency.
Prior to value-added, if a student came in already behind it didn’t matter how much they learned unless they were caught up by test time.
So say a student comes to a 4th grade class at a 2nd grade level in reading and at test time, the student is reading on a 3rd grade level. Without value-added, that progress wouldn’t be reflected anywhere on the report card.
With value-added, however, the district is rewarded for making a full year’s progress during the course of the year, even though the student doesn’t end up on grade level.
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TweetNortheastern penalized on report card for AYP
The state released district report cards today, Aug. 25, and all but one local district maintained or improved its rating over last year.
Check out more detailed information for your district or school building.
I’ll be posting more on each district throughout the afternoon but I’m going to focus on Northeastern for now.
Northeastern is one of only eight districts across the state to receive a lower rating than last school year. There are 610 districts statewide, so we are talking about 1 percent.
The district was penalized for missing Adequate Yearly Progress goals, a standard established by No Child Left Behind. Northeastern didn’t meet the benchmark for students with disabilities or black students.
This is actually the first year that Northeastern had enough students to measure the progress of the black students sub-group for the report card. Ohio requires that there be at least 40 students in a given group, to create statistically significant data and protect the identities of the students in smaller populations.
There’s a bit of confusion about Adequate Yearly Progress, or AYP. It’s essentially a measure of improvement from one year to the next for sub-groups of students. There are six sub-groups based on ethnicity and one each for economically disadvantaged, English language learners and students with disabilities.
The basis for these sub-groups is that typically these groups do not perform as well on achievement tests as their peers. AYP holds districts accountable for the progress of these sub-groups.
Take for example, Northeastern. The district met every single reading standard for all students (3-8th grade Ohio Achievement Test and 10th grade Ohio Graduation Test). That means more than 75 percent of students tested proficient or higher. Actually Northeastern has pretty strong reading scores, and most were 80 percent or higher.
But when you separate the scores by sub-groups, only about 51 percent of students with disabilities and 60 percent of black students tested proficient or higher in reading.
NCLB, however hated it may be, aims to force schools to pay attention to how those sub-groups are performing.
If a school district does not meet AYP for all groups for three consecutive years and in two or more groups for the most recent year, the district cannot be rated higher than “Continuous Improvement.” That’s how Northeastern ended up here.
And from what I’ve heard, AYP was a factor in most of the eight districts that received a lower rating. At least five of the eight are Southwest Ohio schools: Northeastern, Kettering, Lebanon, New Miami and Hamilton.
I haven’t heard back from Superintendent Rick Broderick yet but will update as soon as I do. If anyone has questions about AYP, leave them in the comments and I’ll try to answer them as quickly as I can.
And watch for updates on other districts throughout the day,
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