Written by Andrew Melin, Superintendent
The Indiana Department of Education earlier this year revised the way in which it tells Hoosiers about the performance of its schools under the state's Public Law 221 accountability system.
As recently released, our school corporation received a "B" ranking; however, despite the simplicity of the ranking, we believe it is important to share some key points.
The state's system is based upon two important measures: 1) Performance, overall student passage of required state assessments in the spring of 2011; and 2) improvement, improved passage on those required state assessments either from 2010 to 2011 or over a three-year average, whichever is highest.
In terms of performance, 88.5% of our students passed the state assessments in the spring of 2011, which placed our district 22nd (out of 293 school systems) in the state.
In terms of improvement, however, despite improving two-tenths of a percent (.2%) over our 88.3% performance in 2010, we did not meet the state's required criteria of at least 1% improvement to qualify for the "A" ranking.
In addition to the Public Law 221 state accountability system, all Indiana schools are subject to the No Child Left Behind Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) federal standard, which measures how a school system meets the needs of each student.
As a district, we met the AYP standard, which reflects our school system's commitment to meet the needs of each student.
Each VCS school was also ranked based upon both the state and federal accountability systems, and we will explain how each of our 11 schools faired in future articles.
Although the quality of a school system is measured by more than standardized test scores, in terms of state assessment performance, VCS remains a premier school system ranking in the top 8% of all Indiana School systems.
VCS is very proud of its academic standing achieved through the dedication and commitment of students, parents, and staff members over many years.
Our staff, as is our practice every year, is already reviewing the detailed data, analyzing what it means, and looking at ways to enhance our practice for the benefit of our students.
In our mission and vision statements, we promise to maximize the learning potential of each student in our desire to move from excellence to pre-eminence.
We remain 100 percent committed to that promise.