Willoughby-Eastlake Association for the Gifted and Talented   WEAGT  

Some children begin school with large vocabularies. Other children begin school with little command over words and numbers.

But what value does the school itself add to a student's learning experience?

The "value-added" model attempts to answer that question.

The new data analysis, unveiled by state officials today, measures the effectiveness of schools based on the amount of academic progress students make from year to year.

Like a parent plotting a child's growth with pencil marks on a bedroom wall, the value-added approach measures growth rather than penalizing a child for not reaching a predetermined height. It's a gauge that threatens to deflate the reputations of some heralded schools and gives hope to those schools who are perennially maligned.

For affluent districts where students regularly hit state targets, for instance, value-added rankings might show that students aren't challenged enough. For large urban districts with high numbers of poor students, value-added might show substantial growth, even if test-passage rates miss state targets.

"When you measure the progress students are making, it levels the playing field," said Ohio Federation of Teachers President Sue Taylor.

Put simply, value-added tracks whether a year's worth of learning is actually happening in the course of a year. The data released today does that by tracking reading and math performance and measuring growth at fourth through eighth grade.

The progress is reflected in color codes -- green for schools that exceeded expectations, yellow for those that met expectations and red for those who failed to make enough gains.

"It will help give parents another tool to assess how well their schools are doing," said Matt Cohen, executive director of policy and accountability for the Ohio Department of Education. "It's yet another way of looking at the data."

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:
sstephens@plaind.com 216-999-4827