Portland Public Schools 2009-10 Achievement Gains

check this out first: the tables below break out the "meets" and "exceeds" portion of the graph by grade level, income and ethnicity:

PPS Assessment Overview: Student Gains by Performance Level

        In 09-10, 8005 or 34.8% of all PPS students in the tested years "exceeded".  These students made lower gains than other students.  Is this inevitable?  ACCESS students, at the very top of the distribution, not only made greater gains than other students but outperformed students who "met" in math.  In particular, low-income, Hispanic and African-American students who exceeded made much lower gains than other students.  Can we afford to accept a situation where one-third of our students--those who are most capable--are making almost no learning gains in school?

Meets and Exceeds; Exceeds broken out by Income and Ethnicity 

Notes: 

These tables and graphs were compiled in 2010 from data on the Portland Public Schools website, in the section for "Testing".  See http://inside.pps.k12.or.us/depts-c/rne/results/2010/perfGrowth09.php?resultYear=2010&school=distr .  Numbers from several different tables were combined and a graphing program was used to display the numbers.

This report includes students who have a valid score from both 2008-9 and 2009-10 The data for "gains" subtracts student achievement test scores for each student in 2009 from the achievement test score for the same student in 2010 except in the case of tenth grade gains.  As there is no ninth grade test, the scores of students from 2008, when they were in the eighth. grade, are subtracted from their scores for 2010 when they were in the tenth grade. Students taking the test are grouped by ability in five groups: "Very Low, Low, Nearly Meets, Meets, and Exceeds."

The first two columns of the graph  compare the gains for students who exceeded the benchmarks with gains for students who met benchmarks.  In addition, score gains for Free and Reduced Lunch, African American, and Hispanic American students who exceeded benchmarks in the previous test are shown. 

The chart and graphs represent a "snapshot," not a trend.  It does NOT trace gains from third grade to tenth grade for a single cohort of students.  It compares the gains achieved by students in different grades who all took one test last year and another test one or two years previously.

The chart and graphs only represent student learning for the curriculum that was included in the test and may not fully represent what students actually covered or learned during a year. 

Please note that the scales for the two charts are not the same.  Math runs from -8 to 10 (18 points) while Reading runs from -4 to 10 (14 points).

In addition, results might look different if confidence bands were included.