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Welcome to the 2001
User's Guide
For those of you new to Information
Works!, this Guide presents three kinds of information:
First: The sections marked “What you’re looking at” and “What you’re looking for,” offer brief, user-friendly explanations for the data in each field, along with a notion of what we consider to be the information’s utility.
Second: When relevant, the Guide provides the source of the numbers presented and, in some cases, how they were calculated.
Third: The policies governing Rhode Island’s school accountability agenda are often in the process of being articulated, refined and adjusted with increasing detail.
Information Works! is data-dense, so the Guide merely notes the changes that have resulted from state policy refinements with short explanations of or references to the policy itself. In the interests of keeping the
User's Guide brief and to-the-point, we make every attempt to refer the reader to original sources or further information about policy, regulations and legislation. Our principal concern here is to help the
Information Works! users understand the meaning of their school, district and state data, not to explain comprehensively the considerable background or specific building blocks of RI’s school accountability agenda.
The All Kids agenda
Turning up the heat on improved accountability
for every single child
The most dramatic change on the 2001 school templates are those refinements designed to account for every single child in the tested grades. The children eligible to take the tests but who, for whatever reason, didn’t are this year represented in the “no score” band of the assessment graphs. Schools with a great number of “no score” children will see their overall proficiency rates drop significantly.
This year, roughly 17% of the eligible high school test-takers, 12% of the middle schoolers and 9% of the elementary test-takers did not receive a score.
Schools need to make special efforts to test even those children who have poor attendance, just as they need to understand and address why students are persistently absent or tardy. In the event that schools encourage weak test-takers not to participate in the testing, the practice must stop.
Students exempt from the state exams
Two categories of children are not eligible to take the standard state exams. One category is those children in special education whose Individual Education Plan (IEP) exempts them from the state tests due to the specific nature of their disability. Many special education children take the state tests with accommodations, but the state’s Office of Special Needs estimates that about 1 to 1½% of the total tested population can’t. Starting in the spring of 2001, RI schools will administer alternate assessments to these children. These alternate assessments have just been developed, which is why children did not take them last year. Henceforth, students who achieve proficiency on the alternate assessments will be included as proficient in the overall proficiency count, this year represented in the triangle below the assessment sub-test bars.
The second group of exempted students are those children who arrived so recently in this country that their English is too limited to be included in the testing mainstream. These are the Beginning English Language Learners (ELL) or Limited English Proficient Level One students (LEP I).
Information Works! is taking more careful account of these children to
ensure that their instruction prepares them for the mainstream as soon as possible. In the future, these children will need to meet state standards on the regular assessments.
The triangle below each assessment sub-scale bar indicates the percentage of all students who met or exceeded the state standard including those children who are not eligible to take the state tests because they are beginning English Language Learners or their Individual Education Plan (IEP) calls for the use of an alternate assessments. If all children are to reach proficiency, the state needs to account for the true percentage of children who are proficient in each school.
Information Works!
continues to evolve.
Please note the following changes from last year’s book to this year’s:
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The inclusion of a “no score” band in the assessment bars to represent those children who were eligible to take the tests, but were either absent or did not complete the multiple-day task. |
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The inclusion of an All Students proficiency rate published in a triangle at the bottom of each assessment bar, to capture the proficiency of every child in the grade level, including those who were not eligible to take the state assessments per se. Ineligible test-takers include the beginning English language learner population and those children whose special education IEPs specify alternative assessments. |
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Field #4's disaggregations of proficiency scores by student characteristics are significantly
changed: |
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First, by folding all of the subject matter subtest scores – math, reading and writing – into single aggregate scores to show at-a-glance how schools are faring in each subject area
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Second, by using three years of data to show how the school is doing overall, and not just according to this year’s class of
test-takers
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Third, by including those students who were not proficient to give a more at-a-glance look at how all the students are faring.
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This year’s SALT survey findings focus on school climate, which is to say the students’ experience of their
school.
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This year’s school-level In$ite financial data is reported in a bar graph in order to show the comparison to the state average at-a-glance for that level of schooling – elementary, middle and high.
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The progress towards three-year performance targets are reported in the hardcopy this year.
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This year’s book includes a
state section with the following
charts: |
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Overall statewide assessments results for elementary, middle and high
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Assessment proficiency by students with certain characteristics
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Characteristics of students attending school in this state |
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Tax capacity and effort |
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Property value per student versus district tax rate |
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In$ite – Per pupil expenditure including Other Commitments
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In$ite – Per pupil expenditure excluding
Other Commitments
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In$ite – Per pupil expenditure for Instruction and Instructional support
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“Value-added” charts for elementary, middle and high schools, which show every school’s student performance as compared with similar students statewide.
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SALT survey findings regarding reading, students left home alone and homework
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New School Climate charts for both secondary levels – middle and high – which display each school’s data from the SALT Survey Findings field #6 to provide a view of the school climates and the state as a whole.
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Other resources available
on our website:
The school charts
only available on the Web include:
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Each school’s goals |
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Student suspensions by type |
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Teacher grievances by type |
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Average class size (elementary) or |
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Span of responsibility (secondary) |
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Teacher attendance |
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Targets not included in the hardcopy |
The Principal Sources of the
data for Information Works! are:
State assessments – standardized student achievement tests administered by the state assessment program
SALT Surveys – school-level data from students, teachers, parents and administrators about classroom practice, school climate, expectations, and much more
Basic school-level statistics – School enrollment, demographic make up, socio-economic status, absenteeism, suspensions, etc. collected throughout the year by RIDE
Tax and income statistics – from the state Department of Administration’s Office of Municipal Affairs
In$ite financial data – school-level expenditure data
Form 31 financial information – districts’ revenue and expenditure information submitted to the state through Form 31 provide this year’s revenue information at the district level.
When data are statistically unreliable
When the number of test-takers drops below 10, the results are considered statistically unreliable and are not reported. Also, very small sample numbers could make it possible to identify or to invite guessing as to the achievement results of individual children. Information Works! is about the functioning of schools and districts, not about individual children. Very small classes of test-takers such as those in New Shoreham and the RI School for the Deaf also require leaving a number of fields empty.
An exception to the rule in Field #4
The only exception to this rule is in Field #4 where the number of test-takers can drop as low as 5, because it would be very difficult to identify specific students in data that is collected over the course of three different years (and classes) of testing.
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