The Stability Of Ohio's School Value-Added Ratings And Why It Matters
I have discussed before how most testing data released to the public are cross-sectional, and how comparing them between years entails the comparison of two different groups of students. One way to address these issues is to calculate and release school- and district-level value-added scores.
Value added estimates are not only longitudinal (i.e., they follow students over time), but the models go a long way toward accounting for differences in the characteristics of students between schools and districts. Put simply, these models calculate “expectations” for student test score gains based on student (and sometimes school) characteristics, which are then used to gauge whether schools’ students did better or worse than expected.
Ohio is among the few states that release school- and district-level value-added estimates (though this number will probably increase very soon). These results are also used in high-stakes decisions, as they are a major component of Ohio’s “report card” grades for schools, which can be used to close or sanction specific schools. So, I thought it might be useful to take a look at these data and their stability over the past two years. In other words, what proportion of the schools that receive a given rating in one year will get that same rating the next year?