Students, educators and caregivers celebrate amazing academic successes every day in the District. As the state education agency for the District, OSSE has the unique challenge of findings ways to accurately measure student growth at the state level. Remember, the District has 71 local education agencies (LEAs) – one school district per square mile – and each has a different approach to curriculum, instruction, grading and many other aspects of the school experience. We need to use common measures, which is why our high-quality statewide assessments are so important. Every public school student in grades 3-8 and in specific high school grades take the assessments formerly known as PARCC. (We will be calling our assessment suite DC CAPE going forward, which you can read more about here. Using these statewide assessment results, we measure student growth in two different ways—Growth to Proficiency and Median Growth Percentile.
Median Growth Percentile
Median Growth Percentile (MGP) measures how students are improving in relation to their peers. To do this, each student in grades 4–8 receives a Student Growth Percentile (SGP), calculated by the Center for Assessment (an independent, non-profit organization), which measures how the student’s performance on the statewide assessment changed between 2022 and 2023 compared to District students who performed similarly in the same grade in 2022. The median is the “middle” score at a school. For example, if there are 21 students at a school, they are ranked in order from low to high SGP and the median is the 11th student. There are 10 students with higher SGPs and 10 students with lower SGPs. Once OSSE determines the median at each school, that’s the school’s MGP! We then publish it as a metric on the DC School Report Card.
Because students are only measured against other District students within the school year, the median at the state level will always be 50, which means this is not a good measure to gauge performance trends year over year as a District. However, it can provide meaningful information about how schools compare to each other.
Growth to Proficiency
Growth to Proficiency (GTP) measures whether students are on track to meet proficiency during their educational journey. To use a simple example, if a student tests at Level 1 one year and then a Level 3 the next year – look at that growth! – we can reasonably conclude that the student is on track to hit Level 4 the year after that. In other words, GTP measures if a student demonstrated sufficient growth between two tests to demonstrate that they are on track to reach proficiency in future years. Growth targets are specific to a student’s performance level in the previous year. The students who have already achieved proficiency and remain there from year to year receive credit for doing so.
The school-level growth to proficiency metric is the average (mean) of student growth to proficiency calculations at the school. The higher a school-level GTP, the greater the percentage of students who are on target for proficiency.
For the first time in 2022, GTP metrics will be calculated for students in high school who participated in statewide assessments for ELA and math in both 2022 and 2023. Most high school students test in grades 9 and 10, so the metric will mostly measure growth in those grades.
Learn More
The two measures capture growth in different ways because growth is so important! We love to see it. We also understand that these measures do not capture everything going on in the student’s academic experience. However, we are confident that they are strong statewide measurements. If you want to learn more about how these metrics are calculated, please review the 2023 DC School Report Card Technical Guide. We will also share a post in the future about how student growth is used in our summative school performance scores, so stay tuned!