(Thanks, Rich Ulrich, for pointing out this thread)
Thank goodness my kids are long out of school... Forgive me jumping in
as a layperson with a post that may only be marginally on-topic...
In my local community (Norwood), the same thing happened. The school
with the best score--the Callahan--is the one that got slapped with the
"failing" grade. I have to say that "regression to the mean" was
certainly the first thing that crossed MY mind.
But what seems far more puzzling to me is that the stated figures are:
School Score Change
Callahan 245.3 -1.0
Oldham 242.2 6.5
Prescott 242.5 5.5
These seem to me like minuscule differences.
Needless to say, all public reporting and discussion of MCAS scores
seems to assume that the scores are perfectly accurate, with no stated
margin of error. I believe individual scores are being reported to
students the same way.
Can anybody possibly believe that a difference of one point in 245.3 can
possibly be significant? We're talking about schools with a less than a
maybe sixty fourth-graders in them. This just runs against common
sense...
Worse yet, if such tiny differences are being taken seriously by
officials, there would seem to be strong motives for all kinds of
mischief and "gaming the system" in various ways.
--
Daniel P. B. Smith
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