User's Guide: Reading the Reports
School Report – Page 2
Field #5: Progress summary
WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING AT
In Rhode Island, school-performance categories are determined by
state assessments in English language arts and mathematics. These
assessments are given every year in grades 3, 4, 8, 10, and 11. Each
school’s performance category is determined by the percentage of
students who were proficient and by the percentage of students in
the lowest three categories (Below the Standard, Little Evidence of
Achievement, and No Score) in the assessments. Schools are
categorized as either high performing, moderately performing, or low
performing. Schools without tested grades or without three years of
data are not categorized. The school-performance categories are
based on data from the past three years. Schools that are
categorized are also defined as improving or not improving. Schools
may be improving in English language arts, mathematics, or both. As
explained in the text to the right of this field, schools that are
improving must increase by 3 percent the percentage of students
reaching proficiency and they must decrease by 3 percent the
percentage of students in the three lowest categories. To be
improving in mathematics, they must meet both 3-percent targets in
two of the three subtests; to be improving in English language arts,
they must meet both 3-percent targets in three of the five subtests,
one of which (for both increasing proficiency and decreasing the
lowest scores) must be in reading. School improvement is based on
data from the past five years. Schools that have been low
performing and not improving for the past two years are identified
as “Schools in Need of Improvement.” Of these schools, those
high-poverty schools that receive Title I funds from the federal
government are subject to the provisions of the federal No Child
Left Behind Act. They may be required to offer school choice or free
supplementary educational services, such as tutoring or summer
school. WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR
The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires each state to
devise a plan to bring all students to the level of proficiency by
the year 2014. The high-performing schools are at least half-way to
that goal. But school performance is only part of the picture.
There is a strong correlation across the state (and nation) between
school performance and socioeconomic status. The high-performing
schools tend to be from the wealthier communities, and the
low-performing schools tend to be in the high-poverty communities.
RIDE considers school improvement to be at least as important as
school performance. The schools that have been improving for two
years are making significant progress toward their goal of
100-percent proficiency. The 26 schools that have been improving
in both English language arts and mathematics for the past two years
have been honored by the Board of Regents for Elementary and
Secondary Education as “Regents’ Commended Schools.”
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