Hartford, Conn. (WTIC) – The Connecticut State Department of Education released the 2017-18 results from the Next Generation Accountability System Friday, which showed overall improvements.
That system takes a broad view of school and district performance based on a set of 12 indicators. Those indicators are highlighted by academic performance, absenteeism and graduation rates. Overall, the state’s accountability index increased from 73.1 in 2015-16 and 73.2 in 2016-17 to 74.9 in 2018-18.
The accountability index has been in effect for four years, however, the factor of “growth” (i.e. following a student from grade to grade) has only been in effect for three years.
Areas of improvement included career readiness. These indicators reflect participation in rigorous coursework along with meeting the benchmark on college readiness exams. These indicators improved for the second year in a row.
A deeper dive into these indicators reveals an increase in the number of students participating and succeeding in AP exams. Not only did AP participation increase by five percent in 2017-18, but exam scores of three, four or five increased by 3.8 percent as well.
For high need students, results show improvement and promise over the past three years, especially in the English Language Arts and Mathematics achievement.
Students participating in the arts has seen record highs in 2017-18 with a level of 51.2 percent (up from 47.7 percent in 2015-16).
Additionally, 160 schools across the state were recognized as Schools of Distinction for high overall performance. The results note that 43 of the 160 Schools of Distinction are located in Alliance Districts as well.
The release of these results allows for the Connecticut State Department of Education to be in compliance with the Every Students Succeeds Act. Mainly because it identifies schools that received low marks, which allows the CSDE to conduction a fresh identification for state support.
Overall, the results show improvements while identifying trends and growth among schools in Connecticut. Chief Performance Officer at the State Department of Education, Ajit Gopalakrishnan, says these trends and indicators are helpful in identifying areas of improvement along with areas that need growth.
“We are providing this data in a transparent way such that our educators and our school and district leaders in our school systems can use this information to really change trajectories for our students,” said Gopalakrishnan. “If our students aren’t growing from one year to the next then that tells the school that they may need to look at their curriculum and instructional strategies.
If students aren’t coming to school and attendance isn’t doing well, then we are encouraging our educators and our leaders to use that information to get more kids back to school and engaged. If students aren’t graduating on time or entering post-secondary institutions, then part of this report and the system is to provide that information so they can actually use it to change what they’re doing so that they can achieve better outcome from our students."
Gopalakrishnan continued, "Ultimately, we want to measure the right things and we want to encourage our schools and districts to use this as information to make improvements as necessary.”