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Welcome to the 2002 Users Guide
For those of you new to Information
Works!, please remember that the data is from
school year 2000-2001. Each year of IW!
crunches and displays a wealth of data gathered in the
year prior to its publication.
The Users Guide presents three kinds of information:
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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.
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When relevant, the Guide provides the
source of the numbers presented and, in some cases, how
they were calculated.
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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 –
and now federal – policy refinements, with short
explanations of or references to the policy itself. In
the interests of keeping the Users 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 big picture of RI’s school
accountability efforts
The 2002 State Analysis explains the agenda, each of its data components and
examples of how the information has led to change in
schools.
The federal government gets much more involved –
The “No Child Left Behind Act of 2001"
The most dramatic change on the national 2002 education
landscape is the passage, in December 2001, of the
dramatically revised Elementary and Secondary Education
Act (ESEA, called the ‘No Child Left Behind Act of
2001'.) This act calls for annual testing of all public
school children in grades 3 through 8, school report
cards, various sanctions for “failing” schools,
including the offer of alternative choices for students
trapped in chronically low-performing schools, and
generally increased accountability for schools, systems
and states.
The new ESEA does not directly impact Information
Works! as yet; no section has been changed to meet
its mandates. To a degree, RI is already ahead of the
federal curve because the state has been building an
accountability system which already has most of the
elements mandated by the new federal legislation. For
example, we already publish school reports in
Information Works!. Also, our testing program is one
of only 16 states whose quality meets federal Title I
requirements. RI will have to test more often, but the
tests per se have passed muster. Information Works! will
probably change over time, but those refinements will
evolve with increased understanding of the massive ESEA
law, which can be found at:
http://edworkforce.house.gov.
Performance Progress
Long before the ESEA required them to do so, the Rhode
Island Department of Education (RIDE) and the Board of
Regents have been wrestling with the problem of how to
identify and respond to persistently under-performing
schools. This year RIDE developed criteria by which
schools were judged to be on the one hand either
‘improving’ or 'not improving’ and on the other hand,
high-, moderately- or low-performing. Unlike other
states, RI resisted leaping to judgment with high-stakes
testing, closing schools on the basis of test scores or
withholding state aid. Instead, RI invested its school
accountability efforts in developing a comprehensive
data-gathering and feedback system to help school
communities make informed decisions about their own
unique populations.
But the time has come to turn the wealth of
impressionistic information into realistic statements of
where certain schools are, relative to one another. The
lists which identify each school’s performance progress
serve as triage, if you will, identifying which
schools need the highest levels of immediate attention,
support and in some cases, intervention. Since no school
currently meets the RI goal of All Children to 100%
Proficiency, every school – even those deemed
‘high-performing’ and ‘improving’ – will have
requirements, at different levels of complexity and
intensity, which they must follow to help all students
reach proficiency in math and English language arts.
Both the criteria by which the schools were sorted and
the lists themselves are available in the
State Section.
This year RIDE used only test scores to make its
determinations, but in the future, other indicators will
be included. Under consideration are indicators such as
student absenteeism and school climate data (based on
the SALT survey). Over time, these lists will be
strongly influenced by the way federal accountability
initiatives play out.
As much as possible, RIDE and the Regents are making
every attempt not to let the lists be merely an exercise
in ‘naming and shaming,’ but one that brings as much
support and attention as possible to those schools who
are either not performing adequately, not improving or
both. The state must help schools position themselves to
weather and even fare well as the federal accountability
bears down.
Information Works! continues to evolve.
Please note the following changes from last year’s book
to this year’s:
Other resources
available on this web site include:
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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Each school’s complete set of 8
subtests that contribute to ‘Performance Progress’
designations |
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
test 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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