Report: Every State Now Measures Student Progress in Its Own Fashion
Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, 48 states have signed on to measure student academic progress. What's good about this approach is that it goes beyond the previously used one-time test score comparison. What's not so good is that every single participating state does it in its own way. As a result, according to a new report from the Data Quality Campaign, these student growth measures "are not created equal." While the states may use the same term — "growth" — to describe what they're doing, they're using different methods to calculate it.
As the report explained, state leaders select indicators based on the questions they want to answer, what their state goals are, their capacity, the cost, the ease of implementation and the feedback they receive from stakeholders. They also decide how to calculate growth, summarize and interpret it. As a result of these many differences, growth data can't be used to make comparisons across states, and people who want to consume that data need to be able to understand just what's being communicated.
According to the DQC, most states are working with one or more of five different kinds of measures:
- Student growth percentile, which uses individual student performance data to show how schools have served students with the same academic starting point (in use by 23 states);
- Value table, which use individual student performance data to demonstrate what impact adults in the school have on student achievement, to show how the student's school has helped him or her learn compared to other schools working with similar students (in use by 12 states);
- Growth-to-standard, which uses individual student performance data to show his or her "distance from grade-level learning goals" (in use by 10 states);
- Value-added, which uses individual student performance data to show student progress, based on the state's cut scores (in use by nine states); or
- Gain-score, which uses individual student performance data to show progress from one year to the next (in use by three states).
Three other states are using a "less common growth measure" that are unique from these five; and 10 states are using multiple measures, each combining the measures in different ways. Two states — California and Kansas — aren't measuring individual student progress at all, the DQC stated; California measures CONTINUE READING: Report: Every State Now Measures Student Progress in Its Own Fashion -- THE Journal
