2023 Improving Education -- Ranking Arkansas High Schools by Performance vs. Expected Performance
The time has come for the second issue of my Arkansas High School Rankings. You may recall last year I ranked schools using demographic data and average ACT Composite scores from 232 Arkansas high schools to create a model that produced a predicted average ACT Composite score for each high school. The 232 schools were then ranked by the difference between their actual average and predicted average. The highest ranking school beat its predicted average by a larger amount than any other high school.
The Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) released the Arkansas School Report Cards a few weeks ago. Since then I've been working to produce rankings for the 2022-2023 school year. I will give a brief overview of this year's results in this post. You can view the detailed report of the philosophy, methodology, and analysis behind the rankings here, and see the Jupyter Notebook with the code here.
Recall, this model does not rank school based on how well prepared their students are to succeed after high school. Such ranking systems minimize, or fail to consider, demographic factors that give great advantage to some schools and put others at a severe disadvantage. Poverty, race, and size of the school undeniably contribute to schools' ability or inability to achieve high standardized test scores.
The goal of all educators should be to overcome these barriers and give all students their absolute best chance to reach their full potential. Still, it is ludicrous to expect a tiny, poor school deep in the Ozarks or the Mississippi River Delta to match or beat the average ACT Composite score of a wealthy, large school in Northwest Arkansas.
In most school ranking systems, one of these small, poor schools can beat the socks off of demographically, similarly situated peers, and still have no chance of outranking a large, wealthy school that may even be UNDERPERFORMING when one considers their demographic advantage. This ranking system levels the playing field where demographics are concerned.
This is especially important when one considers the fact the disadvantaged schools have no control over the factors that place them at their disadvantage. A school cannot entice wealthy, educated parents to enroll their children when the school serves a community where the only industry is the local Dollar General and the average income is below the poverty level. A school with a miniscule tax base lacks the resources to purchase technology and curriculum that larger schools with relatively unlimited resources take for granted. A school with less than 500 students in grades K-12 cannot afford to hire extra teachers to offer extra classes that might spark the interest in learning that some students need to stay motivated and engaged. Schools cannot control these variables that limit their ability to generate the scores achieved by their demographically advantaged counterparts.
In this ranking system, schools are ranked by how well they perform against how well they should be expected to perform when those demographic factors are taken into account. And what you see may surprise you.
NOTE: The goal of this project is to help schools improve, not to label some schools good and others bad. Therefore, I will not name or highlight low-performing schools. Stakeholders in those underperforming schools can look at the rankings, identify similarly situated schools, and seek to learn what they do different to achieve their results.
This year, 230 high schools that were included in the data download from ADE made it through the filters and into the rankings. Of those, 227 were ranked last year. Data for two schools, North Little Rock High School and Caddo Hills High School, that were included last year were not included in the download from ADE. Three other schools dropped out of the rankings because their number of graduates fell below the threshold for inclusion--St. Paul High School, Premier High School of Little Rock, and Rural Special High School. Three schools were new to the rankings this year--Emerson High School, Augusta High School, and Graduate Arkansas Charter School.
Of the 227 schools that were included in both this year and last year's rankings, 118 improved their rank, 107 fell, and 2 ranked the same both years. The top-ranked school this year--Dierks High School--improved its average ACT Composite score by 2.73 points to beat its predicted average by 3.74 points. Dierks jumped 42 places in the ranking from last year to claim the top spot for 2023.
The fourth place school in this year's rankings--Lead Hill High School--improved its average ACT Composite score by 3.5 points, from 17.5 last year to 21 this year, to vault 152 spots this year. Omaha High School, Dardanelle High School, and Fayetteville High School took the other places in the top five, placing 2nd, 3rd, and 5th, respectively. Bergman, Melbourne, Emerson, Bradley, and EStem rounded out the top ten.
You can view the entire list of 230 ranked schools here. I would love to hear your questions, comments, and concerns about this project in the comment section below.
Comments
Post a Comment