Monday, November 2, 2009

Trends in the performance of students scoring “advanced” on 6th grade MSAs



With an abundance of caution, and the proviso that MCPS has a data warehouse that should better answer the question, I draw your attention to the trends in students performing "Advanced" on the MSAs.

Are the numbers of students scoring "Advanced" on MSAs in 6th grade showing a declining trend?

The data in one column is for a "non-magnet" middle school while the data in the other is for a "magnet" middle school. Both show the beginnings of a downward trend. The fact that a number of disparate schools display this trend should be of concern to Carver.

Is this a consequence of an ill thought out differentiated instruction experiment?

Or, could it be because the number of "Superintendent, Deputy, Assc, Asst" went up from FY 08 to FY 09 while the number of "Teachers" went down from 10261.4 in FY 08 to 10219.8 in FY 09?

Should our priority be teachers or administrators? Established teaching practices or experimental efforts?

2 comments:

  1. Mr. Singam, Please disclose the two schools for which you are presenting data. Also, when you examine the data for other middle schools, is the downward turn in 2009 seen?
    Thank you for your work on this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. As expected, no response from the first questioner's inquiry on data specifics. I appreciate the slick charts/presentation, but this data is limited to just two schools. Why is that? To draw some conclusion from this data (possibly cherry picked) is a little bit of a stretch. Using this logic, I would have predicted the same downward trend in 06 to 07 for one school, which did not happen.

    ReplyDelete

If your comment does not appear in 24 hours, please send your comment directly to our e-mail address:
parentscoalitionmc AT outlook.com