State Level Charts and Guide:
Student Characteristics and Achievement

Student Achievement Adjusted for “Value-Added”

Example elementary school - Click here to view and/or print this chart in PDF format.

How to read RI’s value-added charts

Select a grade level below to view and/or print the value-added chart in PDF format:

Elementary (28 KB) || Middle (9 KB) || High (8 KB)

The green number indicates the school’s students performed above their counterparts statewide and the bold black number indicates the school’s students performed below similar students statewide. ‘Regular type’ indicates the school’s students performed the same as similar students statewide.

Leveling the Playing Field

If you took the raw achievement scores by district and sorted them high to low, you would find that you had also sorted almost perfectly by the median family income of each district. Without the strong intervention of schools, students tend to achieve according to their socio-economic backgrounds. This pattern is by no means peculiar to RI. 

Schools with high concentrations of low-income or special needs children have always complained about being unfairly compared to schools whose less challenged children perform at high levels on standardized tests. The public tends to compare high-performing schools with low-performing schools without considering differences in student characteristics. In fact, poverty is the strongest predictor of student achievement, except for a student’s prior achievement. (Without a Universal Student Identifier system in place, RI is not able to factor prior achievement into its research.)

Statistical Modeling 

In recent years educational researchers have begun building statistically generated models which can calculate what results schools are likely to achieve when taking into consideration the characteristics of their student body. For over 30 years, researchers have known that the achievement results of different sets of students, such as those from different schools, vary in association with several specific key factors, including:

1. Poverty (by far the strongest predictor of student achievement, with the exception of prior achievement)

2. Non-English speaking background

3. Educational background of the parents 

4. Having special learning needs, and

5. Having a minority racial group identity

While individuals with one or more of these characteristics can and do perform well on state assessments, the majority tend to perform less well than children who do not have these characteristics. There are many reasons for these historic patterns of achievement. They include such things as school expectations, the availability of flexible grouping and different types of instruction, inadequate funding and support to the schools these children attend, and the quality of social services offered to students. 

Statistical models make it possible to establish an achievement benchmark that acknowledges the challenges that can affect children’s readiness to learn. The models help us look at the same achievement data through a lens that filters out some of the students’ challenges. This lens provides a different, but newly uniform and, in some ways, more practical benchmark against which to measure actual achievement. 

Modeling Rhode Island Schools

Because Rhode Island is such a small state, the entire body of 156,454 students enrolled in public schools serves as a context from which the test and grade-specific ranges were derived. Thus, groups of students within a school are compared with similar groups of students statewide; schools themselves are not sorted for comparisons. The computer-generated ranges will change depending on the test because, for example, a writing assessment is more strongly affected by language minority status than a math test. This year’s model uses one year of assessment data.