Technical Brief on the 1999 Statistical Model

Statistically Generated Performance Versus Actual Performance

The second field of the Rhode Island school reports presents a school's achievement results on various state tests in a manner different from, but complementary to, the reporting of absolute scores on state achievement tests. The fourth field of the Rhode Island school reports takes the same achievement results and portrays them in yet a third manner - as disaggregated results reported by the different types of students found within a school. A combination of all three ways to view these achievement results leads to a much richer and deeper understanding of how an individual school is doing in helping all its students attain the required level of PROFICIENCY on the state administered tests.

In brief, RIDE and researchers at URI's National Center for Public Education and Social Policy (NCPE) have used statewide student information to create within the second field of the report a virtual school, that is, data about groups of students whose characteristics are statistically the same as the ones in a single school report. This second field demonstrates how an individual school is performing while taking into account a number of student variables. In the past schools have been compared solely by raw achievement scores as if the challenges in each school were roughly the same. We know they are not. In the future, as schools improve and as our statistical model is refined with more variables, the "virtual schools" will also change.

All children in all schools can and must meet the Regents' high standards for proficiency. But schools and the wider public need to understand which schools are indeed making progress or are more effective than other schools which are resourced similarly and are facing similar challenges. Over time, this virtual school model will provide an additional measure that helps the state to target investments of both money and human resources to improve schools.

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