| Times-Shamrock Newspapers spent weeks collecting and analyzing data from 480 public school districts in Pennsylvania to develop an extensive database used to measure the performance of 37 local districts for the 1999-00 school year.
The resulting report takes a pulse of districts in seven counties -- Lackawanna, Luzerne, Monroe, Pike, Susquehanna, Wayne and Wyoming -- and their 123,693 students.
The report measures student and district performance in several categories. It reveals:
Success on the SATs and percentage of students taking the college entrance exam.
How districts compare in student demographics, spending and teacher pay.
How our city schools compare to each other.
Performance on state assessment tests and other standardized tests.
Information will allow readers to review the state of public education in the region and explore what is occurring in our school districts.
One caveat is that numbers never tell the whole story. A district that has poor Scholastic Assessment Test scores or Pennsylvania System of School Assessment test scores, may have a superb music program, championship sports team or outstanding teaching staff.
The report is intended as a starting point to foster discussions about the state of education in local districts.
Reporters spent time in classrooms examining those qualities in the districts that the numbers do not reveal -- among which are the quality of fine arts programs, student satisfaction and the struggles facing classroom teachers.
Reporters also visited schools and spoke extensively with local educators to see why the districts performed as they did.
For the analysis, data was collected from the state Department of Education and individual schools for 480 public school districts in the commonwealth. While the commonwealth has 501 public school districts, districts with incomplete information were eliminated. The analysis also does not include data or information on the 20,165 private, parochial and homeschooled students within the seven counties. That information was not available. For example, the Diocese of Scranton's policy is not to reveal any test scores.
Collected data included: average SAT scores, enrollment figures, the number of classroom teachers, teacher-student ratios, per pupil expenditures, percentage of budget spent on instructional activities, percentage of days teachers used for professional development, teacher-absenteeism rates, student-dropout rates, student-attendance rates, percentage of low-income students, percentage of students taking the SATs, state assessment test scores in math and reading for fifth, eighth and 11th graders, percentage of special education students, percentage of gifted students, average classroom teacher and administrative salaries, years of teaching experience, the number of students per computer and the percentage of graduates pursuing higher education.
Much of the data is self-reported by school districts. If numbers appear too high, or too low, local school officials should be questioned.
After extensive collaboration with educational statisticians, the newspapers analyzed the data with the widely used statistical software program, SPSS.
Because of the keen public interest in test scores and student performance, one of the goals of the analysis was to see which pieces of data contributed to low and high SAT scores and low and high state assessment test scores in math and reading.
The analysis reveals that data with the strongest correlation to high and low test scores are the percentages of low-income students in districts, student-attendance rates and per-pupil expenditures.
"Per-pupil expenditure and the percentage of low-income students are the standard variables for this type of analysis," says Dr. Thomas P. Hogan, interim provost and academic vice president at the University of Scranton. "Those two often have the highest correlations with test scores."
With the database and information from the 480 districts, Times-Shamrock was able to come up with average predicted SAT scores and average predicted state assessment test scores for each of the 37 local public school districts.
The predicted scores are tailored specifically for each district. They paint a picture of how well each district is doing on those tests based on its resources, student and teacher demographics and other factors.
By comparing the predicted test scores with the actual test scores for each district, Times-Shamrock is able to see how close, or how far away, the districts came to their predicted scores.
"This is the way researchers do these things," says Dr. Hogan. "The methodology is the accepted way."
The comprehensive report also includes some of the raw data so readers can compare those factors they feel are most important in educating students. Much of that raw data is similar to what is reported on public school districts in the Pennsylvania Department of Education's School Profiles -- found on its Web site: www.paprofiles.org.
"It's a way to give parents and taxpayers a snapshot of local schools," says Dan
Langan, spokesman for the state Department of Education. |
