It appears that the proportion of “economically deprived” students is generally increasing in DCPS, and that the proportion of students who are not yet fluent in English has almost doubled since 2004.
However, I don’t know if the definition of “Economically Disadvantaged” has changed over time, or whether it’s gotten easier or harder for a student to be designated Educationally Disabled (i.e., eligible for and receiving some sort of Special Education services), nor whether the definitions of Non-English Proficient (NEP) or Limited English Proficiency (LEP) have changed, either. I compiled this data by combing through the NCLB data for each of the years 2003 though 2007; all of the data is available on the OSSE-NCLB-DCPS website, but you have to do a fair amount of work to make longitudinal tables and graphs like this.
Thanks for doing the dirty work and digging into the numbers. Interesting trend, particularly with the ELL increase.
Just out of curiosity, what do you do now that you are a retired teacher? Are you still employed? I’m only wondering because it seems like a lot of the data-gathering you’re doing is time-consuming. If you prefer not to share this publicly, I’d appreciate an email. Thanks.