Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Monday, August 21, 2006
The valley’s top 50 elementary schools
(Then 5-year-old Jesse Albritton arranges flowers at Gorman Elementary School in 2002)
There’s a heck of a story hidden in the news today about how Dayton’s charter schools compared with the city school district this year.
It just so happens that a small school in the city that exclusively serves handicapped students (some of them with severe handicaps) was rated the top school in the area on state reports that came out last week.
THE top school!
Gorman Elementary School’s “performance index score,” which judges test performance across all tested grades, was higher than any school in Oakwood, Centerville, Springboro, Mason or any of the other traditionally top rated school districts. In fact, the Gorman kids darn near recorded a perfect score.
There are 275 elementary and middle schools in the Miami Valley, too many to list them all here. But I did pull the top 50, for those who are interested. (Go here to see the rankings for Miami Valley HighSchools.)
Here they are with their index scores (top score is 120):
Gorman (Dayton) 117.3
Broadway (Tipp City) 112.9
Whittier (Sidney) 111.4
Western Row (Mason) 110.4
Prass (Kettering) 109
J.F. Burns (Kings) 108.8
Sugarcreek (Sugarcreek) 108.5
Englewood (Northmont) 107.9
Phillipsburg (Northmont) 107.8
Mason Intermediate (Mason) 107.7
Harman (Oakwood) 107.6
Demmitt (Vandalia-Butler) 107.6
Nevin Coppock (TIpp City) 107.2
Helke (Vandalia-Butler) 107.2
Driscoll (Centerville) 107.1
Hamilton-Maineville (Little Miami) 107.1
Weller (Centerville) 107
Smith (Oakwood) 106.7
Mason Middle (Mason) 106.3
Valley (Beavercreek) 106.2
Magsig (Centerville) 106.2
Botkins (Botkins) 106.1
Oakwood Junior High (Oakwood) 105.8
Murlin Heights (Vandalia-Butler) 105.6
Emerson (Sidney) 105.5
Englewood Hills (Northmont) 105.2
Columbia (Kings) 105
Clearcreek (Springboro) 104.8
Main (Beavercreek) 104.6
Fort Loramie (Fort Loramie) 104.6
Beverly Gardens (Mad River) 104.6
Newton (Newton) 104.5
Concord (Troy) 104.5
Russia (Russia) 104.4
Shaw (Beavercreek) 104.3
Parkwood (Sidney) 104.1
Kyle (Troy) 104.1
Hadley E. Watts (Centerville) 103.7
Menlo Park (Huber Heights) 103.7
Westbrook Elementary School (Brookville) 103.5
Normandy (Centerville) 103.5
Tower Heights (Centerville) 103.4
Kings Mills (Kings) 103.3
Northmoor (Northmont) 103.3
Ferguson (Beavercreek) 103.1
Morrow (Little Miami) 103.1
Bellbrook Junior High (Sugarcreek) 103.1
Greenview (Greenview) 102.6
High Street (Piqua) 102.6
If there is a school you’re interested in that’s not on the list and you REALLY want to know how it ranks, send me an email at selliott@daytondailynews.com and I’ll look it up for you.
To see how school districts ranked, and other data from the state’s report card release, go here.
Coming tomorrow: The Miami Valley’s high schools ranked from top to bottom.
(Image credit: Skip Peterson, DDN)
Permalink | Comments (10) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools, Testing
Charters and the district — Siamese twins?
(Parent volunteer Charmaine Trayvick with fourth-grader Kevin Russell at the Richard Allen charter school’s Edgemont campus last year. Richard Allen’s schools have consistently rated among the best in Dayton)
In today’s paper, I did my annual comparison of charter schools and district schools, based on state test performance.
This comparison, which I’ve done since 1999, has gotten increasingly tricky as the state has changed, several times, its method for evaluating schools. What I’d love to do is compare the overall performance index for Dayton Public Schools with a similar figure for the city’s charter schools. That would tell you who did better using the state’s best comparison measuring stick.
But I can’t do that.
To run the performance index for charters, I’d need the raw data the state used to create each school’s index score so it could be aggregated and the calculation run for the group in total. I don’t have that data.
It’s tempting to simply take the index scores for all the charters, add them up and divide to get an average. But since index scores essentially are averages of passing rates already, that would be averaging an average. I’m no mathematician, but I’m pretty sure you can’t do that and get a valid figure.
Instead what I did was rank all the city’s public and charter schools by their index scores and see what it looks like.
Well, their scores look a lot alike. And that’s a lot different from how this chart looked just a few years ago.
Charters still dominate the bottom of the list, as they have most of the years I’ve run the comparison. But otherwise, they look much like the district — a few very good scoring schools at the top, some very low scorers at the bottom and a bunch in the middle.
So there’s two ways to look at this. Either it’s evidence that charters are improving steadily, in which case we would expect them to eventually outperform the district, maybe in a few more years.
Or you could look at the $45 million plus the state is spending for charter schools in Dayton this year and ask if it is worth the money to essentially recreate the school district’s performance?
What’s your take on charter performance?
(Image credit: Chris Stewart, DDN)
Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, Dayton Public Schools, My Favorite Posts, Testing
