ASD Takeover Target Data

This past week the Achievement School District informed six Shelby County Schools that they have a charter operator interested in taking them over for the 2016 school year.

As always, I think it is valuable to examine the data on those schools who are taken over to see if there are any trends. Below is an infographic that you can play around with which includes overall achievement percentile in the state, TVAAS growth index and scores scaled 1-5 and student population for each school. ASD composite numbers have been included for the sake of comparison. All data has been drawn from TN DOE data downloads or the public TVAAS site.

You can interpret the data yourself, but here are a few trends that stick out at me:

Overall, target schools are underperforming – there’s no way around it this year. Almost all the targeted schools are collectively underperforming even compared to the ASD. No school targeted for ASD takeover this year had a higher Raw Growth Index score as assigned by the state of Tennessee. A few schools did score higher in individual literacy and numeracy scores, however.

ASD vs Takeover Target Achievement – in 2 of 3 subjects, ASD schools on average are outperforming the target elementary and middle school’s in proficiency. In reading they are doing better than 3 but worse than 2.

ASD better in TCAP than in EOC –  its worth noting that the ASD has a much better track record with elementary and middle schools than with high schools. You can see in the second chart that while the ASD’s overall TCAP composite is positive, its EOC composite has been much lower by several orders of magnitude.

That holds true in the raw TVAAS section as well, where the ASD received 4, 3 and 4 in Overall, Literacy and Numeracy for TCAP but 1, 1 and 1 for the same sections in their EOC scores.

Higher population targeted – it is worth noting that 5 high schools were eligible for takeover but only 1 was targeted. That school was also one of the 2 most populated schools in Shelby County among those eligible for takeover with a population of 512 last year. Only Douglas had a higher population (522). Given that charter schools have to maintain a bottom line financially, it makes sense that operators would target more populous schools.