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By Steve Taylor
Public charter schools are afforded a great deal of autonomy in academics, operations, and finances in exchange for increased accountability for student performance. The Public Charter School Board (PCSB) holds D.C. charters accountable by means of its “Performance Management Framework” (PMF). This year’s school-by-school PMF scores are scheduled to be released on November 1.
For elementary and middle charter schools, the PMF score reflects re-enrollment rates, attendance, and performance on the District’s high-stakes annual assessment, the DC CAS, which tests students in reading, math, writing, and science. For public charter high schools, the scores also reflect graduation and college acceptance rates, SAT scores, and the percentage of students passing Advanced Placement (AP) tests (equivalent tests such as the International Baccalaureate are used as well). Of these factors, student performance on the DC CAS is the largest component of the PMF score. This performance is measured in two ways.
The first is the percent of students at each school scoring proficient or advanced on the test. This measure is essentially a snapshot of how students are doing on the day the test is administered.
The second measure, known as the “Median Growth Percentile” (MGP), measures how much academic progress each individual student is making relative to his or her peers. In this context, “peers” are all students across the city who scored the same or very similar to that student on the previous year’s DC CAS. Each tested student is assigned a growth percentile based on this comparison; the school’s MGP is calculated as the median of all of its individual student percentile growth scores. A high MGP means that a charter school is teaching its students better than lower-scoring schools are teaching students who are at similar competency levels.
The MGP is a major advance in the use of high-stakes testing to judge school performance, because it takes into account improvements in individual student performance over time. This allows schools with a large number of lower-performing students to demonstrate that they nevertheless are moving students toward proficiency at a greater rate than are other schools in the District.
Be on the lookout for the new PMF, and make sure to take a close look at the MGP when you see it.