Every year the Ohio Department of Education releases a report card for each school district in the state. The report cards measure attendance and graduation rates and districts' achievement on proficiency tests.
The state sets standards for each of these areas and assigns each district a rating based on how well it performs in each area.
The state ratings are assigned by tallying how many of the 18 standards the district met. These ratings designate each district's proficiency levels - excellent, effective, continuous improvement, academic watch and academic emergency.
The 18 state indicators include third-grade reading proficiency test, five fourth-grade proficiency tests, sixth-grade proficiency tests, ninth-grade proficiency tests and graduation attendance rates.
Another category used to formulate a district's rating is Adequate Yearly Progress -a weighted factor in determining a district's proficiency level. Adequate Yearly Progress is achieved when students from different ethnic, socio-economic and special needs groups, as well as those who take English as a second language, within the district have improved test scores from one year to the next, according to the Ohio Department of Education's Web site (http://www.ode.state.oh.us).
As part of the No Child Left Behind Act, every student is expected to score 100 percent on reading and math tests by 2014. Schools across the country have to meet their Adequate Yearly Progress each year as a step in achieving the goal of 100 percent passage rates within the next 10 years, said J.C. Benton, spokesman for the department.
Each district is also given a performance index score, which rates the performance levels of each fourth-and sixth-grade student on each of the five tests. The ratings -below basic, basic, proficient and advanced -are averaged and a school is given a score that represents the proficiency levels of all students on all five tests.
The highest performance index score is 120; 100 is the goal for schools.
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Katy Ganz
