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By William Steward
A Powerpoint look at the Norwalk Public Schools CAPS scores by school.
Tags: In the News · Norwalk
For those unfamiliar with CMT and CAPT scoring bands, they are:
Below Basic (a failing score)
Basic (a failing score)
Proficient (a passing score for NCLB)
Goal (a standard of excellence)
Above Goal (a standard of even greater excellence)
I viewed the Power Point presentation, but I don’t understand it. Why show those students who score at levels Basic and higher? This is combining failing (Basic) scores with passing scores. Below Basic is the only level not included. Wouldn’t it have been easier to report those who scored Below Basic?
Am I missing something? Also, scores mean little unless they are viewed over time. Other years of data (including this year) are readily available online.
Silence, I’m not an educator. I’m parent with kids in our schools and a data guy who could not follow the discussions in the papers or online. I’m just getting used to this information and I’m real visually oriented. When Corda states that School A should be emulated and someone here replies that we look at B. I just had tidbits and this gave me some grounding.
I used Basic & above, as the most inclusive to identify differences. Perhaps Proficient and above would have been more appropriate for a NCLB study. You’re right, it is a report of those who are Above/Below Basic. The scores are inclusive of all grades in the school.
I agree that a snapshot in time is not the best. I’m not there yet in gathering or understanding year over year data. I’d like to know more about AYP scores & targets.
I heard about wide disparities in elementary schools. Now I can see them. It’s also interesting to note that something like the metrics for economically disadvantaged improve from elementary to middle schools. Makes me think that a lot of teachers know what they are doing.
I wondered about listing the # of students for each category or an average column for each category, but I figured it might be useful to get some feedback first.
Do you have a link that provides a breakout for the last school year? When I use the CT State Department of Education query tool for scores I can’t seem to get an aggregate across grades for a school. So for a school that had 32 Hispanics overall, in the grade by grade breakout a lot is not displayed because the population by grade falls below 20. Since I couldn’t get the data electonically I did a lot of typing and proofing from pdf’s.
Vet Park Junkie: I have often thought about the interesting conversation that some of us frequent contributors to this site could have if we were in a room together.
CTREPORTS.COM is the best website because you can see scores from a couple of generations of CAPT and CMT. CAPTREPORTS.COM shows you only the 2007 scores. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any source that would give you aggregate results across the grades. There are some parts of the website that are secure, requiring passwords that are given only to principals. Not being a principal, I don’t have the access, but I have seen that part of the site, which gives very detailed information.
NOTE: If a school has a subgroup under 20, there is no scoring at all for that group. If the subgroup has fewer than 40, the scores are reported, but they don’t count for NCLB. Some schools may actually be doing miserably with some subpopulations, but their demographics are such that they get away with it — to a point. Where they don’t get away with it is in the reporting for the entire district, which is also assessed by the results of all of the schools.
I hope this explanation isn’t too muddy.
Silence Dogwood what a great idea but I’m sure the room would be targeted with a JDAM ,
seriously I enjoy numbers you guys and ladies come up with,Vet Park my kids are in the same schools trust me the wife and I thank you for the visual, her last day in the Norwalk school system was this week.
Silence Dogood, thanks. I think that I’ve been there but will check it out again. GP, thanks, too.
Are any cross school comparisons provided to the teachers? Something that would enable you to say something like “Wow, school X has great ELL scores. I should call to see what’s up.” ELL may be a bad example because of the population size, but you get my idea. When I was at GE, we spent a lot of time getting actionable information out to employees, not just raw data that required detailed knowledge and data manipulation skills.
(For those who didn’t spend hours at a school website, ELL = English Language Learners)
