2019 SCHOOL DAY SAT RESULTS
BOISE AND STATEWIDE

Idaho's 2019 School Day SAT results were released in late June, and we were able to procure statewide results by high school and district soon thereafter. The vast majority of Idaho's 11th graders take the SAT on a given day in April each year. Every Idaho student is required to have taken a college entrance exam in order to graduate.

What follows in this post is an analysis of the results, considering free/reduced lunch percentages as one axis of our SAT comparison, and scale scores for math and ERW as the other.

Here are some important factors to consider as you look at the results:

1) Year over year comparisons of scores on the SAT are often made. It's important to understand that those comparisons are made among different groups of students - each is a distinct group of 11th graders. 

2) Though most students take the SAT on the School Day exam date, some do not. If they have already taken or plan to take another exam such as the ACT, they do not have to take the School Day exam. So, even though percentages of students taking the exam are high, they may vary from school to school and from year to year. And a few schools prefer the ACT and de-emphasize the School Day SAT. That's why we check junior class enrollment and exams given each year, and leave out of the comparison schools that test fewer than 90% of their juniors.

3) It's tempting to look at very high scores for small schools, pronounce their performance as "greatly improved", and expound on what they did last year to improve their performance, even though the "growth" could be due to one or two high-scoring students, and scores will likely decline the next year because those students are not taking the test. We usually limit our comparison to schools with 75 or more juniors tested. 

Idaho Ed News did a story this year about Kootenai High School's remarkable SAT scores, which improved by almost 150 points over last year. Problem is, the school tested only 12 students this year and 9 the year before. And, in fact, scores at Kootenai High declined substantially (by almost 80 points) from 2017 to 2018, before the big increase.

Kootenai most assuredly does an awesome job with preparing its kids for college. But IEN has done this before in a 2014 story of Kootenai's progress on the SAT.

The Scores

SAT scores, along with SBAC, are notoriously highly correlated with poverty. So the higher a school's poverty level, as measured by free/reduced lunch percentages, the lower the SAT scores, typically. What we look for are scores that are higher than might be expected. 

As noted above, we use only scores from high schools that tested 75 students, AND tested 90% or more of juniors enrolled at the school. So, here are the scores, in context:

SAT ERW

Boise, Timberline, Madison, McCall - these are schools that outperform SAT expectations each year, even considering their demographics. It's not surprising, though, considering that these schools lead the state in Advanced Placement (a College Board product, as is the SAT) exam participants each year, along with Century of Pocatello. On the other hand, Marsh Valley (a smaller district near Poky), Fruitland, Twin Falls, and Skyview had higher scores than predicted, as well. And each year, Caldwell's scores are surprising. considering the demographics of the high school.

SAT MATH

In SAT Math, it;s almost the same story. But note that Timberlake (a northern Idaho high school in Spirit Lake), Borah, and Coeur d'Alene have higher scores than we might predict. And Caldwell's math SAT scores, considering the expectations and their demographics, might just be the best in the state. 

MATHEWS' CHALLENGE INDEX:

HIGH SCHOOLS OFFERING RIGOROUS CURRICULUM

Jay Mathews is an education columnist for the Washington Post. He's published the Challenge Index since 1998, first under the umbrella of Newsweek Magazine and then for the Washington Post. This year, he assembled the index on his own, and published it in May.

The Index is a ranking system that uses a simple formula to achieve an indicator of rigor in a high school system. Take the number of Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exams and divide by the number of on-time graduating seniors at the high school. If the ratio is greater than 1, the schools is eligible 

Each of the Boise District's 4 comprehensive high schools have been ranked on the Challenge Index for 11 consecutive years. Boise and Timberline have been ranked for a longer period of time, Boise since 1998 (the inception of the list) and Timberline since 2002.

Charters and Private Schools

Mathews takes data from Charter and Private Schools and includes them in the index. For the 2019 rankings, North Star Charter (116) Riverstone (Private, 5.7), and Coeur d'Alene Charter (2.6) were included on the list. 

Comprehensive High Schools

Here are the rankings for the Idaho comprehensive high schools included on the 2019 list:

Vallivue High School has made the list for a number of years. The district's new high school, Ridgevue, has joined Vallivue on the list. It's impressive that both of these schools, with half their students qualifying for free/reduced lunch, give so many exams.

Participation in Mathew's Challenge Index wad won this year. It appears to have been less known than in previous years, perhaps because it was not sponsored by the Post. In past years, Century High School in Pocatello has been a top performer. 

Still, over 2,500 high schools were listed, so we can make a few comparisons.

In Washington, the Bellevue high schools continue their stellar performance in the index, with all comprehensive high schools ranked in the top 250 in the country. Sammamish High School, with 35% free/reduced lunch, gave over 5 exams per graduating senior - amazing. Bellevue remains a district with results that we aspire to in Boise.

Lewis and Clark High School in Spokane (2.6 ratio, 35% frl), Edmonds Woodway High School in Edmonds (2.1, 30%), and Union High School in Camas, WA (2.2, 25%) had results similar to those of Borah and Capital.

We will provide more information on Advanced Placement results in Boise and around Idaho in the next few posts.

IDAHO ED NEWS PUBLISHES 

k-12 EDUCATION POVERTY INDEX

Last month, Idaho Education News published a k-12 poverty index. Well, it was really a ranking of schools they developed using State Department of Education ESSA data, which were all highly correlated with poverty.

Everyone loves a ranking system. It's interesting to see where businesses or football teams or public schools line up in the rankings. With schools, though, you get what you get, and kids are not widgets. We don't throw out those that don't fit, who have special needs or don't speak the language. We educate them all, so it's important to consider the factors that affect their education.

And these factors make it necessary to get creative to serve kids' needs. Schools with high populations of free/reduced and/or Limited English students desperately need services that will put them on a more level playing field with Longfellow in Boise or Paramount in West Ada, such as:

• Early learning services such as pre-k and full day kindergarten.
• Community Schools services that provide wrap-around services so kids can come to school ready to learn.
• College-ready programs such as AVID (Boise, Mt. Home, and Vallivue) and P-16 (Caldwell) that give kids the tools they need to navigate the college process and the confidence they must have to succeed.
• Scholarship programs established with benefactors from the business world to help them afford the costs of post-secondary.

These programs will go a lot further in improving success and "Go-on" rates for our kids than a list contrived to congratulate some districts and schools and punish others based on their poverty levels.

However, the success of a school’s more creative approaches to learning requires much more effort, understanding and context.

In compiling their list, IEN doubled-down on the data, using data from the Idaho Department of Education's 2018 ESSA plan calculations, combining composite values of all schools, elementary, secondary, alternative, and other configurations into a big list to show which schools are the top (and bottom) "performers". These composites are basically aggregate measures of status and growth on the SBAC, with grad rates and a couple of other measures thrown in.

After IEN posted their rankings, they were besieged with comments from those who wished to critique their methodology, which clearly had some issues. But that's not really the point. Every measure used by the SDE as part of its plan was highly correlated with poverty. So why not just use poverty levels for the rankings?

We looked at IEN's lowest and highest ranked schools, adding free/reduced lunch status and LEP population percentages as factors to consider, in order to add some context to the rankings, and to illustrate just how closely they are related to free/reduced lunch and Limited English populations at the schools.

The IEN Elementary Schools

Here are bottom elementary schools in the state, as ranked by IEN.

The more you look at these data, the more you understand that the information used by IEN for their rankings really does reflect poverty and language barriers more than anything else. There are some anomalies, such as Webster in Lewiston and Teed in Kuna; otherwise, the data show that these schools serve impoverished communities around the state of Idaho.

Among the very highest IEN-ranked elementary schools, we see names that have been high SBAC performers since the test was initiated in Idaho - those with low free/reduced lunch percentages and few Limited English students. These schools should perform well on this test, which favors students with a wealth of experience.

In the next group of elementary schools from the IEN rankings, we see more of the same. A number of schools listed here have little diversity, and low levels of poverty and Limited English. 

There are a few exceptions here, though. Rulon Ellis Elementary in Pocatello, Discovery in Bonneville, Chief Joseph in West Ada, and Westside in Idaho Falls all have FRL percentages closer to the state average, and Chief Joseph and Westside have higher LEP percentages. These are  schools at which we should look for example of high achievement with challenged populations.

  

The IEN Junior Highs/Middle Schools

At the middle school/junior high level, the picture is much the same. Check out the lowest ranked schools, and you'll see:

Most of these middle level schools have very high percentages of free/reduced lunch. The two that have lower percentages have large numbers of Limited English students.

For the most part, the highest ranked middle level schools are the opposite in configuration.

As you might suspect, the high school data show the same patterns. Idaho Ed News has effectively created an index of school poverty, with very few exceptions. 

It's kind of like looking at the SAT data without a filter. Yes, Boise, Madison, Timberline, and McCall all do well. They should, and as a matter of fact they exceed expectations in their performance. But when you examine the data considering the free/reduced lunch data, you find that the schools with the best performance are...Caldwell and Fruitland.

With the state’s so-called accountability system finally falling into place, as well as the Governor’s welcomed emphasis on literacy, it will be more important than ever to cast a critical eye toward any seemingly simple “ranking” of schools. Behind every measurement focused on first and worst there are real students facing real barriers to learning and succeeding. Let’s not lose sight of that.