I had found a site that let you break scores down school by school at some point – I’ll look for it again later.

I’m not an expert in education, but I have friends who are. One of them cowrote a compelling article to reform the funding of education in California to make it more equitable. The point of the article was to get more funding for schools with higher rates of poverty to help address the achievement gap they are seeing there. Yes, poor students can do well. However, they are more likely to not do well because of their home situation. And, even if they do have a supportive home life, being in a school with a higher level of poverty means their peers will impact their ability to get a good education.

Another important consideration is the % of English Language Learners in a school. I’m not saying that English Language Learners can’t do well, but depending on how recently they began school in English, it will be much more difficult for them to score well on the CMT. West Hartford’s % of ELLs are higher than other districts in our DRG – West Hartford is at 17.6%, virtually all the other towns are under 9% with the exception of Greenwich which is at 17.2% but their free and reduced lunch is at 7.8% while West Hartford is at 14.3%. (See the Strategic School profiles)

Specific quotes from the article:

“The negative relationship between poverty and achievement is one of the most well-documented findings in educational research. In California,the highest API scores of high-poverty schools tend to be lower than the lowest API scores of low-poverty schools. In other words, there is virtually no overlap between the performance distributions of high versus low poverty schools.”

“Importantly, students in high poverty schools face a double disadvantage arising not only from their own poverty but also from the poverty of their peers. Numerous studies of high- and low-poverty schools find that, in high-poverty schools, a student’s peers have had fewer opportunities to develop vocabulary and cultural capital, and tend to have lower aspirations, more negative attitudes toward achievement, and higher levels of disruption and mobility. In addition, parents are less likely to be involved in the school, to hold teachers accountable, and to be able to provide financial or other support. Thus poverty concentration is an important factor in allocating resources, as poor students in high poverty schools face greater educational challenges than poor students in low-poverty schools.”

To read the full article:
http://www.law.berkeley.edu/centers/ewi/GBTFissuebriefFINAL.pdf

You can find the free/reduced lunch numbers on the first page of the “School Profiles” for each school. The CAPT and CMT numbers are available via the appropriate links. I think you can get breakdowns by school and by district, but I’m not entirely positive. The CAPT test is in its third generation. 1st gen testing doesn’t translate to second gen, but second gen supposedly translates to third gen. This was the first year for third generation — I’m not positive when second generation started.

I guess one of the things that irks me is that the numbers just become soundbites, easy ways to celebrate or condemn. They demand to be read, and I’m just not sure I’m numbers literate enough to read them very well!

To do this properly, you would need to get more years of data for the same sample, but I’m not sure how to do that? Do the web sites have prior year data on them? How old is this test (I can’t remember which one is newer).

Thanks for doing this. We need more numbers like this in our debate.

Do you happen to have breakdowns for both numbers by individual school?

Sujal