We sift through data to find the following:
o How well did your school do in 2010?o How well did your student do on the state test last year?o How many students are in debt?o How many students are on free or reduced lunch?o How many students are in foster care?o How many students are in supervised probation?
By looking at the above questions, you can better understand why your school district or school is not currently performing as well as it could. A high school that struggles withancouver ISD can be a struggling school district. The same struggles can exist in your own neighborhood.
So what does all this mean to you? It means that every child in the city has the right to a great education, regardless of where they attend school or in what district. Education is a civic duty. We need more of it not less.
So how does fixing the rankings for Chicago schools help? It means that we must fix it nationally. Schools should not be ranked simply by the number of students in poverty. A great education is a combination of many skills, not one skill. If a school has a lot of students in poverty, it is likely that poor academic skills are also a cause of the low rankings.
Parents should be informed of the strengths and weaknesses of different Chicago schools. They have the right to object to schools that do not measure up to their expectations. Unfortunately, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) does not require schools to provide special education services or meet other core expectations. However, parents generally have limited options in Chicago school rankings.
The Education Week research found that most parents prefer their children to attend public schools. There are exceptions: 42 percent prefer school systems with large minority populations; 24 percent prefer school systems with a high percentage of low-income students; 21 percent prefer a low-income school and 19 percent “like” schools that have high percentages of minority students. “The desire to have a diversity of schools is really just a random guess,” saidAndrewTerry, senior researcher at Education Week. “It could be racially or racially blind.”
Other researchers have found that race and ethnicity do not determine which school is better for a child. It also does not matter where parents live or which racial or cultural background their children have. Parents’ regional differences in opinion across these categories does not necessarily matter, according to research by the University of Minnesota at the beginning of the school year. One might suspect that geographic location would matter more if it is a diversity issue.
Still, it does make a difference, albeit small, on how well children will do once they attend school. “Ethnicity… leaves a greater impact on students’ achievement than other variables,” noted Dan I. Carter, statistics co-ordinator for the Minnesota Department of Education.
So for example, if there are no significant differences in the quality of schools for different groups in the building, how will population growth factor into consideration?
A 1999 study estimated the average academic gains by race/ethnicity: African-American students, computed at .74; Caucasian students, computed at 1.19; Hispanic students, 1.16; and Asian students, 1.07.
One need only look at the differences in racial/ethnic distribution of students allowed to attend public schools to see the difference. These figures should tell us not only that a given school is likely to be educating students of different origins, but that a given school is likely to be educating students with differing capabilities and temperaments.
Applied Learning Theory
So what does all this have to do with the application of applied learning theory? As students gain in confidence and sophistication during their school years, the complexity of theory may also increase correspondingly.
Students 9 years old and under make up 42% of the sitting population in the orientations. Given the conservative estimates of baseline proficiency of students, the 4% difference in performance between 9-year-olds and 11-year-olds could conceivably be enough to tip the scale toward a tending towards underestimate of the true NCLEX predictor values.
However, it will be important to remember that NCLEX predictor values have a demonstrated relative accuracy of. Having said that, with the large sample sizes of the current evaluations and the even larger sample sizes of the predictor values, applied learning theory should still work.
All things considered, it looks like it may be true that a given student can have an NCLEX predictor value of zero. However, that doesn’t mean that such a student won’t pass the exam. The critical value in passing the NCLEX is not having the best possible score on the exam itself, but having the best possible score in the many observations in the process.