Is the Highlander School Doing Well Enough to Have its Charter Renewed?

According to Jennifer D. Jordan of the Projo, the Highlander school, a K-8 charter school located in Providence, is in danger of having its charter not renewed by the state's Board of Regents for education...

[State Education Commissioner Deborah Gist] said she is concerned by a weak curriculum and uneven test scores that continue to trail state averages.

"I don't have confidence they are on the right track because their performance declined last year," Gist said in an interview.

However, according to the most recent New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) data available, Highlander appears to have been on a definitively positive track for a while now. At the most basic level, NECAP results show that over the past two years, more Highlander' 8th-grade students have scored proficient-or-better in both reading and mathematics than did Highlander 5th-grade students from tests taken three years earlier.

An improvement in the number of students proficient has also occurred in the last two classes of Highlander 7th graders, as compared to 4th-grade results from three years prior; and in the last two classes of Highlander 6th graders, as compared to 3rd grade results from three-years prior.

But how does the degree of improvement compare to what is happening elsewhere in Rhode Island?

To begin to answer this question, we can employ a method outlined a few months ago here at Anchor Rising, based on expressing changes in numbers of students in a district who demonstrate proficiency in a subject in terms of...

• The percentage of students who began as less-than-proficient, in cases where the number of students proficient-or-better increases, or
• The percentage of students who began as proficient-or-better, in cases where the number of students proficient-or-better decreases.

This metric is a better means of comparing results between districts (or between schools) than are single-moment-in-time comparisons of proficiency levels, because considering the change over time begins to incorporate the fact that different school districts are working with students who are beginning from different achievement levels, and a school that has 50% of its students proficient now when only 30% were proficient three years ago (28% of less-than-proficient students improved) might be viewed as doing as well or better than a school that has 80% of its students proficient now and had 80% proficient three years ago (0% of less-than-proficient students improved). More of the rationale and some caveats and limitations of this method as applied to NECAP data is discussed here.

Making the usual disclaimer that comparing NECAP results from different years is only an approximation to results describing a true cohort of students, because the publicly distributed NECAP data doesn't contain the information needed to adjust for student mobility in and out of a districts over a multi-year score-comparison period, the change in Highlander's proficiency percentages, as compared to other Rhode Island school districts over the same three-year period, shows that the percentages of students at Highlander who moved to proficiency relative to the number of students who began the three-year stretch as less-than-proficient 1) are significantly higher than the district-average changes in most RI urban communities and 2) are often comparable to results in suburban districts.

The details are displayed in the tables below. 6th, 7th, and 8th grade reading and math results from the NECAP summed over the last two years and compared to results from three-years earlier are included for Highlander, 4 urban districts (Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, and Woonsocket), and the two districts which would rank immediately above and immediately below Highlander, according to the metric described above, if Highlander were a district unto itself.

The initial conclusion is that, over the most recent three-year stretch, Highlander and Highlander students seem to have shown an improvement in both reading and math that is comparable to districts not usually considered to be in crisis, at least within the intra-Rhode Island world of education policy (with the results from 3rd-to-6th grade math being on the bubble). But as always, when giant charts of numbers are presented at Anchor Rising, the floor is open for commenters to offer their own analysis and suggestions for refinement...