Gains and Not So Much ...

Number-Crunching By Cranky

By John R. Butcher

February 7, 2016 by cranky

I have discussed the notion that divisions with high pass rates have little room for improvement while those with lower pass rates are shooting at larger targets.  VDOE’s (bogus) accreditation process seems to recognize this.  I suggested that a better measure of progress is the overall pass rate change divided by the previous year’s failure rate, in order to measure the relative change in the failure rate.  Today we have those data for the Richmond schools.  I’ve left out Amelia St. Sp. Ed., which had an enormous (51%) drop in the pass rate. To begin, the raw change in the five-subject average pass rates:

And then the pass rate change divided by the 2014 failure rate:

Here are the data.  Note that comparison of the high schools with the elementary and middle schools is biased this year by the new retest policy in grades 3-8 that boosted the pass rates by ca. 4%.