Readers Ask... Explain the Lists

A number of you wrote or called with questions about the LYS Top Ten Lists. The following, from an assistant superintendent, does a good job of summarizing the gist of those questions:

SC,

Can you please provide information on how the list was determined? What criteria and methodology were used?

Thank you.

SC Response

The list is a by-product of a tool my team and I began to develop when I was the State Director of Innovative School Redesign (Texas). I needed a way to determine the effectiveness to redesign interventions in school across different settings.

The short version of the system is that we look at factors that make school performance more difficult: Size of the campus; type of campus; percentage of economic disadvantaged students; percentage of LEP students; mobility; heterogeniality; number of tested grades served; instructional competence; instructional excellence.

Then we run it all thru the system and essentially get a slope rating (a golf term that measures the difficulty of a particular course) for every campus in the state of Texas.

So what is the practical application of this tool? Based on our numbers, in your district (Acceptable Masked Title I) High School, with an overall score of 153 is outperforming (Recognized Masked Affluent) High School with an overall score of 151.7. Think of it as Moneyball for schools, (Acceptable Masked Title 1) High School is doing more with less.

We don’t make our list public nor do we share access to the tool, because quite honestly, all it does is make the coasting, affluent schools of the world mad.

Hope this helps.

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Your turn...

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