Leadership Matters August 2013 issue.pub

ISBE unveils growth metric value tables By Michael Chamness IASA Director of Communications

Standards,” “Meets Standards,” “Below Standards,” and “Academic Warning” into “A” and “B” categories, in effect creating eight categories instead of just four, and awarding growth points for moving from the lower to higher subdivision within a category. Recognizing that it is more difficult to show growth for high-performing students and awarding significant points for maintaining the performance of top students. “The goal is to show growth even among the highest-performing students, and the Value Table acknowledges that the room for growth is less among top performing schools and districts,” O’Brian explained. The accompanying Value Table uses color coding to help interpret the results. The gray cells represent students who have maintained their performance from year to year, while the green cells represent students who have achieved a higher level of proficiency and the red cells represent students whose performance has declined.

In an attempt to go deeper and provide a more nuanced look than No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) is unveiling Value Tables as a Growth Metric to provide schools and school districts another way of demonstrating progress. “We wanted something that could help measure growth instead of just the pass/fail standards used in the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) reports,” said Mary O’Brian, ISBE’s Director of Assessment. “We wanted to try to create something that was valid, reliable and fair from the standpoint that results do not favor one type of school district over another. AYP does not provide a nuanced look at the performance of schools or districts.” The Value Tables (see table below) award points based on a student’s growth from one year to the next. Some of the features used to go deeper than AYP’s measurements include: Dividing the AYP categories of “Exceeds

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