How does your school system compare with state averages?

PARCA has been working on a new system for presenting information about Alabama’s public schools.

In the next few posts, we will be rolling out some tools that we hope educators, parents, students and communities will find useful in understanding how their local schools stack up: where they are succeeding and where they might improve.

Our first offering is a way of looking at ACT Aspire results from 2014. The display below compares the performance of Alabama systems with the state average result for students in grades 3-8 in either reading or math. The results represent the percentage of students who scored at or above the level the state considers proficient at that grade level. The state average result for all students is represented by the red reference line in the graphics.

You can explore the results by picking which system you want to compare with the state.

You can look at the results for all grades or choose to focus on one.

You can also choose to look at the results by demographic subgroup. By default, the results displayed are for the following subgroups of students within the system: “All Students,” “Nonpoverty,” and “Poverty.” You can choose to add other subgroups to the comparison or focus on a specific one.”

Across the state, you’ll note gaps in the results between various subgroups.  Students from poverty households tend, as a group, to perform less well on these tests than students from nonpoverty backgrounds. It’s true here and it’s true across the country. It’s one of the great challenges of public education. It’s also true though that kids from poverty backgrounds perform better in some systems than in others. This creates the potential to learn from those successes and replicate best practices.

These were tests administered in the spring of 2014. Students across the state are currently taking the ACT Aspire for 2015. 2014 was the first year the ACT Aspire was taken statewide. Because it’s the first year of a new test, results were slow to be published. It is hoped that results from the testing going on right now will be available much more quickly. And we plan to be in a better position to analyze and publish them quickly. The Aspire tests are one of the cornerstone measures in the state’s strategic plan for educational improvement, Plan 2020.  In future posts, we’ll present additional avenues for looking at Aspire data and will explore the results of other measures that are part of Plan 2020.