06
Jun
wolfandrhys asked: OK. I like the rankings for the most part. How highly are you weighting diversity and poverty if Drew is ranking so much higher than SPARK or MES or Jackson??? Your methodology was supposed to emphasize "exceeds" yet schools like Jackson or SPARK have vastly greater exceeds percentages.
Hey. Glad to hear you liked it for the most part. On the page, I linked to a methodology that lays it out in more detail. It would take a long time to walk you through all grades, but I´ll try to walk you through 3rd grade as an example. I gave one point for every student meeting and 3 points for every student exceeding. I´m going to post an article tomorrow on why exceeding is so much more important.
When you average all 5 subjects. The scores and state percentiles look like this:
Springdale Park: 2.36 (96th percentile)
Morningside: 2.37 (96th percentile)
Drew: 2.09 (90th percentile)
So, Drew scored lower than those two schools, but still pretty high overall in the state. It also scored MUCH higher than its peer schools whose students are less advantaged than those in Midtown and VaHi. With peer schools, I calculated the percentile relative to schools with the same needs index. So Morningside and Springdale are compared to schools like Brandon, Jackson, etc. At the peer level, the percentiles look like this:
Springdale Park: 69th percentile
Morningside: 70th percentile
Drew: 2.09 99th percentile
To calculate the final score, I weighted the peer percentile as 60% and the state percentile as 40%. The purpose of that is to recognize that students come in with different levels of needs. Morningside and Springdale Park are both great schools, which is why they got A´s. The fact that Drew is serving mostly disadvantaged students and getting them up to the 90th percentile in the state is really impressive. No other school in their peer group is doing that.
