High Poverty Levels Depress School
Performance of All Students—II
Most of the
comments on this topic in the preceding section or page—EDvNED
16 Dists—also apply here (for EDvNED All Dists). However, there are several major improvements
to this version.
First, the packaged
data includes 775 of Texas’ regular school districts, containing 4,827
elementary and middle schools enrolling 2.9 million students. It was attempted
to exclude both magnet schools and disciplinary attendance centers. The data
set used in the previous version included elementary and middle schools for
just 16 of Texas’ largest school districts. Also, schools with percentages of
economically disadvantaged students that exceeded 95 percent were excluded from
the previous data set due to difficulties in estimating the Making Grade Level (MGL)
rates for non-economically disadvantaged (NED) students. This more recent data set uses Texas
Education Agency data which gives the numbers and percentages of NED students
who meet the MGL standard for each grade level and for each subject. Those data were aggregated to obtain the
MGL_NED percentages for all grades and subjects in each elementary and middle
school in the state.
Second, due
to the large number of districts represented in this new data set, a feature
was added to permit the on-line user to create lists of districts that may be
of particular interest, and to save and be able to recall those lists from the
user’s local storage on the device being used. In addition, subsets of school
districts can still be selected by county, using a drop-down list of county names.
Third, the
single graph that was used to superimpose the test results for ED and NED
students in each school can be presented as two different graphs. In this mode, additional graphs can be substituted
for the initially-presented graphs.
Fourth, one
of the new graphs available plots the differences in the MGL_NED – MGL_ED
scores for each school. Thus, districts
with many schools with unusually high differences in test results between ED
and NED students in the same schools can be quickly identified.
As in
previous versions of this software, when a single school is identified several data elements are displayed beneath the graphs, color-coded
to correspond to the school. And if the
user has chosen the aggregate mode, data for all schools within an enclosing
rectangle are presented in an appropriate form, such as totals, averages, or
weighted averages.
Additional
features are still available, which the user can become aware of by reading the
instructions [Instructions] or supplemental instructions [Supl. Instr.] after clicking on the associated link at
the bottom of the screen.