We are required by the US Department of Education (USED) to differentiate school performance in our school accountability system. We get a lot of questions about what “differentiate” means. Basically, we have to figure out how to use data to place each school on a continuum from highest performing to lowest performing that we need to identify for school improvement (you can learn more about that process in our previous post on the subject). In short, we cannot design a system that gives every school an A+, so we use one that we believe gives schools the best opportunity to gather points toward their summative scores based on the students they serve. We hope that by the end of this post, you will have a good understanding of why we use floors and targets as well as how they work.

As we have explained in a previous post about summative scores, we calculate each’s school’s overall (or “summative”) score by adding up the points they earn across all available metrics in the accountability system. There are quite a few metrics. To earn points for a metric, the school needs to be above the 10th percentile for performance for the District, which is the “floor.” The 90th percentile is the “target,” where schools get every available point for that metric. Using the 10th and 90th percentiles means that for most schools, their performance on each metric will fall somewhere between the floor and the target. Schools on the lower end of performance on some metrics can still accrue points for their overall score. We have set floors and targets by metric, grade spans and student groups, meaning that schools will earn more points if performance is strong across all of their student groups. To use an example, if the students with disabilities at one school are performing the best in the District on the DC CAPE assessment for math, the school would get all of the points for that student group for that metric. If their students who are economically disadvantaged are performing somewhere in the middle, they would get roughly half of the available points. Schools need to be above the 90th percentile for every metric for every student group to earn all available points for their summative score.

For the 2023 summative scores, we calculated the floors and targets for each metric using data from the 2022-23 school year. For the sake of consistency, we will continue to use these floors and targets for a few years when we will recalculate them again.

We understand that floors and targets add complexity to the system. There are a lot of numbers and a lot of math. However, we believe that adding this complexity is the best way to ensure that we measure school performance for all student groups.

Learn More

If you want to learn more about how our accountability system works overall, please check out this post on our accountability system. We also have a post about how we calculate student growth how we calculate student growth that may be of interest, as well.

#DCSchoolReportCard #accountability