Details on those ‘Dozens and Dozens’ of Schools

As promised, I am posting the charts that I laboriously put together from data published by OSSE and a spreadsheet leaked to me, showing how unconvincing was the progress at the only 13 schools that WaPo reporter Jay Mathews could find that even vaguely resembled the ones that Michelle Rhee bragged about.

I am not going to look at the schools with large percentages of white students or at McKinley Tech.

First, here are my charts for Payne ES, Plummer ES and Prospect LC. I color-coded the chart much the way that Erich Martel does. That is, each diagonal sloping up to the right represents an individual cohort of students as they move from grade to grade, from year to year. Obviously I have no way of telling how many students transferred into our out of each cohort, but my experience in several DC public schools in all four quadrants indicates that students don’t move around all that much.

Thus, at Payne, under “Reading”, in the column for 3rd grade, in the row for 2010, you see the number 27. That means that at Payne, in the 3rd grade, in school year 2009-2010, about 27% of the students were ‘proficient’ or ‘advanced’ in reading according to their scores on the DC-CAS. The next year, most of those kids returned as fourth graders in the same school, and about 23% of them ‘passed’ the DC-CAS in reading because their answer sheets had enough correct answers for them to score ‘proficient’ or ‘advanced’. Note, that cell is also blue. But the next year, 2011-12, the percentage of students ‘passing’ the DC-CAS doubled, to 46%. I find that jump worthy of a red flag. Either that teacher did something astounding, or the students are an entirely different group of kids, or else someone cheated (most likely not the students).

 

Any time I saw a drop or rise of 10% or more from the year before for a single cohort, I noted my “red flag” by writing the  percentage of passing scores in bold, red.

Notice that at Plummer, the cohort in blue, in reading, went fomr 40% passing to 18% passing to 46% passing in the course of three years. The cohort in green in math went from 60% passing to 18% passing to  29% passing.

At Prospect, the cohort in yellow goes from 25% passing to 0% passing to 5% passing to 5% passing in reading. In math, the same group goes from 13% to 31% to 0% to 24% passing.

You see anything weird with that? I sure do.

Next come Thomson, Tubman, Hart, and Sousa:

 

The only one of these schools with a chart not covered with ‘red flags’ is Hart.

Your thoughts? (As usual, the “comment” button, below the end of this story, is tiny. Sorry about that.)