Okay, after a wee bit of digging on this second to last day of summer vacation for us APS teachers (most of us, anyway), I come up with the following:
As per the Journal story on test scores, 82 of 127 APS did not reach "AYP" (Annual Yearly Progress) this past year. That's 64 percent (actually 64.5, and the Journal rounded down incorrectly, but who's counting?), as stated in the article.
After going through the APS per-school reports*, I find that of the 82 schools that didn't make AYP:
21 of the 82 (25.6%) made AYP in every area EXCEPT "Students with Disabilities"
8 of the 82 (9.76%) made AYP in every area EXCEPT "English Language Learners"
16 of the 82 (19.5%) made AYP in all areas EXCEPT both "Students with Disabilities" and "English Language Learners"
So.......combining those three categories:
45 of the 82 failing APS schools (54.9%) made AYP overall, but are considered to be failing due to one of the three categories above.
If one were to take those 45 schools and move them to the "passing" column, overall APS figures would show that 90 of the 127 District schools ( 70.9%) made AYP. Conversely, that means only 37 of 127 (29.1%) did not achieve AYP overall.
Of course these disaggregations of the data are fraught with questions both statistical and philosophical. I'll leave those questions alone for now, and just roll the numbers around in the old noggin. Anyone wishing to fill in some thoughts, assumptions, inferences about these and other AYP numbers are certainly invited to chime in here.
*Note: I overlooked the specialty schools (e.g., New Futures) in my own count, as these schools typically don't have sufficient numbers of subgroup (e.g. "students with disabilities") test-takers to statistically qualify for subgroup calculation. I'm pretty sure the Journal story includes them in the overall figures, however.
Monday, August 06, 2007
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2 comments:
Liars figure and figures make liars! So much for statistics. Considering what you guys have to work with AND put up with, you really do a pretty good job!!
I enjoy your blog and want to encourage you to keep at it!
The absolute travesty of all this testing is the poor disabled kid who, as an 8th grader being taught on a 3rd grade reading level lets say, has to sit through all those days of testing working on a regular 8th grade level reading test. When of course they just fill in the bubbles, they have the option of sitting quietly, or reading a book. No drawing, coloring aloud thank you very much. And silly me, I thought the IEP was a leangle document that superseded the NCLB!
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