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Friday, December 9, 2011

IDEA Academy vs East Austin Schools on Achievement and Student Characteristics « A "Fuller" Look at Education Issues

IDEA Academy vs East Austin Schools on Achievement and Student Characteristics « A "Fuller" Look at Education Issues:

IDEA Academy vs East Austin Schools on Achievement and Student Characteristics

While Austin ISD and IDEA Charter Schools continue to use percent passing as the metric poor whether schools are doing well, the far more accurate manner to measure the effectiveness of a school is to use student growth. Moreover, to use student growth over a three-year time span in order to ensure consistency in effectiveness and dampen the effect of any particularly “good” or “bad” cohort of students.

To do this, I rely on the Financial Allocation Study for Texas (FAST) data system on the Texas State Comptroller’s website. The site can be found at: http://fastexas.org/

Before getting to achievement, let’s examine the student characteristics of East Austin schools and IDEA Academy. Unfortunately, we cannot examine prior academic ability since there is no measure prior to the third