Wednesday, July 18, 2012

If You Must Have a BVP Caveat...

One thing you must grant "no excuses" schools is that they know how to get good test scores out of the gate. No more of this taking a few years for a school to find itself. So regardless of all other concerns, getting good scores after 1 year is impressive.

But, in RIDE's new classifications...

  1. BVP got 25/25 in student growth, but that is compared to how a single class did in October the year before, when the school didn't have any particular interest in maximizing their scores.

    Also, these schools tend to be good at a big jump in math during 5th grade. If you can put the hammer down (I'm not saying its easy or everyone would do it), you can yank kids up several grade levels that year, but then it naturally levels off as you hit more abstract math. Point being, everything else being equal, the growth score will probably be lower in the future.

    Then again, the student growth scores are likely to just be crazy volatile. For example, next year BVP student growth will probably be compared to a completely different, much more affluent set of students than they were this year, since they'll be compared whatever students in the state got the same (higher) score this year. There tend to be crazy year to year variations in these things.

  2. BVP also got the highest subgroup gaps score of any middle school: 27/30. This, however, follows what seems to be a pattern for schools with very high gap scores: not having 20 LEP and IEP students (total). In which case your score for low-income and minority students essentially counts double, and in BVP's case they're good. You can also infer that the 12 or so LEP and IEP students who took the NECAP did pretty well anyhow at BVP. However, 31 LEP and IEP students in that cadre took the test as 5th graders, so... ? Where'd the rest go?

Also, for gap measurement purposes, is BVP "Urban," "Urban Ring," or "Suburban?"

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