Beware of Bias in High School Progress Report Cards
The DOE would have us believe that the high school progress reports it released last week are a neutral evaluation tool where any school can do well irrespective of student demographics and characteristics. As proof it would point to its peer index metric which sorts schools into peer groups based on student characteristics and their eighth grade standardized test scores – the concept being that schools are compared to schools with similar students.
Unfortunately the system doesn’t work the way it was intended. The UFT’s Jackie Bennett first reported on this in early 2010. She found that high schools with high percentages of high need students (special education, ELL, overage for grade on entry) were consistently scored and graded lower than schools that didn’t have such students (here and here). That year the DOE announced it was changing its peer index calculation to better