Glossary
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Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) - Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) is the yearly designation given to schools whose performance and progress is considered acceptable. The designation is federally mandated by the No Child Left Behind legislation, but each state separately determines the specific guidelines for their schools. If AYP data are not available, participation rates were checked instead.
Affiliate - In many of the states where NCEA is active, there is a partner organization - the affiliate - that both promotes and facilitates our work. For more information, please see the affiliate information page.
Average Scale Score - An average scale score is the mean scale score of all continuously enrolled and tested students on a state exam for one particular tested grade and subject in a single year.
Average-Performing School (Comparison School) - An average-performing school is one that meets the NCEA criteria for consistently average performance. These schools are studied alongside higher performing schools as a comparison in order to determine the behaviors unique to the higher performing schools.
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Best in State Charts - These charts compare the selected school with not only the highest-performing comparable schools, but also with the highest-performing of all the schools in the state, including schools with more advantaged students.
Best Practice - Our method for identifying best practice is to work backwards from demonstrated high student achievement and to describe what these schools are doing to foster high-performance from their students. Our National and State Studies investigate the practices of consistently high-performing districts and schools across the country with the findings of these studies displayed using The Best Practice Framework.
Best Practice Framework - The Best Practice Framework graphically illustrates the systemic organization of the practices of consistently high-performing schools and school systems. The Framework brings often isolated school improvement activities together for the common goal of raising student achievement.
Best Practice Institute - In some states NCEA conducted Best Practice Institutes that brought up to five higher performing schools together with their superintendents, principals, and lead teachers. These institutes provided an opportunity for the higher performing schools to share their successful practices, and let NCEA gather best practice information through scripted interviews about each theme of the Framework.
Best Practice Study - State Best Practice Studies provide a common way to identify the practices of each state's high-performing schools, to equip educators with information about "what works" for their own improvement efforts.
Broad District - A Broad district is a large urban school district that was a finalist for the Broad Prize for Urban Education in one of the years from 2002-2005.
Broad Prize for Urban Education - The Broad Prize for Urban Education is a 500,000 dollar prize in scholarships awarded each year to a top urban district in the country. This award is provided by the Broad Foundation in Los Angeles, California, and also provides 125,000 dollars in scholarships to four runner-up districts each year.
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Case Study - A case study is the written output of a site visit to a higher or average performing school.
College/Career Readiness (CCR) - Is a benchmark for reading and mathematics in Grades 3-11 that is based on research conducted by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and the Texas Education Agency linking student scores on the Grade 11 Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) to the same students' scores on the ACT, SAT, and the Texas Higher Education Assessment (THEA), a test used to assess students' need for remediation in higher education.
Commended Performance - Commended performance is analogous to the proficiency rate, and is the particular label used in Texas to describe the highest standard on their exam.
Communities Just for the Kids - Communities Just for the Kids is a sister organization to Just for the Kids that aims to help members of public school communities work successfully with educators to raise student achievement using Just for the Kids’ School Reports and Best Practice Framework. These members of the public school community are businesses, parent organizations, faith-based organizations, community organizations, foundations, individual parents and educators.
Comparable Schools - Comparable schools serve equal or greater numbers of disadvantaged students when compared to your school. These schools meet the selection criteria for comparability, which general includes measures of their low income, size, English Language Learners, and percent tested on a particular exam. Because there are criteria concerning a particular exam, a new pool of comparable schools is selected for every analyzed test. For more information about the selection criteria in each state, please see each state’s site.
Continuous Enrollment - Students who have been on the same campus for several years are considered continuously enrolled. At the elementary level, continuous enrollment is usually three or more years at the same campus; at the middle and high school levels it is enrollment since the beginning of that school level (i.e. high school students enrolled since the beginning of 9th grade.)
Criterion - One of the requirements for being identified as higher performing. For example: percent tested criterion there must be an appropriate percentage of students tested on each exam.
Critical Attribute - Critical attributes list the key features of a particular practice from the Best Practice Framework.
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Data Quality Campaign - The Data Quality Campaign (DQC) is a national, collaborative effort to encourage and support state policymakers to; 1) improve the collection, availability, and use of high-quality education data, and; 2) implement state longitudinal data systems to improve student achievement. For more information, please see the DQC portion of the website.
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Economically Disadvantaged - Economically disadvantaged refers to the percent of students who were eligible for Free/Reduced Price Lunch programs at their school.
English Language Learner (ELL) - An English Language Learner is a student whose first language is not English, and is determined to be in this category by their school.
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Free and Reduced Price Lunch (FRL) - Students who are eligible for federal Free and Reduced Price Lunch programs are considered economically disadvantaged, and included in aggregate schoolwide low income levels.
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Higher Performing School - A higher performing school is one that meets all of the requirements within the NCEA identification criteria. This designation can be made for specific subjects (i.e. a school is higher performing in Mathematics) or overall across all tested subjects.
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Level - School type determined by grade span: elementary, middle or high school. In the majority of cases, elementary schools compose some portion of Kindergarten through 5th grade, middle schools 6th-8th grade, and high schools 9th-12th grade, although these may vary based on state trends and unusual grade spans.
Longitudinal Data - Longitudinal data describes datapoints that may be connected over time for a particular student, and which provides the ability to link performance and enrollment records across multiple years. Longitudinal data is used to determine the group of students who were continuously enrolled at a campus, and to define their average prior performance.
Low Income Level - Low income level refers to the percent of students who qualify for federal Free and Reduced Price Lunch (FRL) programs, and are therefore considered economically disadvantaged.
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Multi-Year Summary Chart - The Multi-Year Summary charts show trends in your school’s opportunity gap over multiple years for a single selected grade and subject.
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No Child Left Behind (NCLB) - No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is the 2001 federal legislation that oversees the application of standardized tests, and requires particular performance standards in every state.
Norm-Referenced Test (NRT) - A norm-referenced test (NRT) evaluates a student's performance based on their relative position to all other test takers. This results in a score representing their rank among other students, and not their specific knowledge of the test materials. The alternative to a NRT is a criterion-referenced test (CRT).
Number of Students - For privacy reasons, no information gathered from a group of less than 10 students is analyzed or reported. While this does remove schools with very small class sizes from higher performing consideration, it is part of NCEA’s compliance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) legislation protecting the privacy of individual student reports.
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Opportunity Gap (OpGap) - The opportunity gap is the difference between the percent of students meeting the state standard at the selected school and the average percent meeting the standard in the top comparable schools on one particular exam (i.e. 4th grade Reading in 2005). Top comparable schools are those schools with equal or greater percents low income and English Language Learners (ELL) than at the selected school, and are of comparable size. A school's opportunity gap is positive when its performance is better than the average, and negative when it is below.
Organizing Theme - See Theme
Overall Rank - The overall rank describes a school’s relative performance across multiple grades and years within one particular subject.
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Participation Rate - The percent of students tested on each exam.
Passing Rate - A specific standard on a state exam; the percent Passing would be the percent of students meeting or exceeding that standard.
Performance Rate - A performance rate is the percent of students who passed an exam at the level of an established standard (for example, the percent of students who were Commended on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills exam (TAKS). The performance rate refers to one tested subject, grade, and year (i.e. 4th grade Reading in 2005.) Whenever available, the performance rate is limited to students who were continuously enrolled on the campus for several years.
Pool/Pool Size - The pool is the group of comparable schools to which your school is compared. The pool size is the number of schools in that group.
Prior Performance - Used in the high-performing analysis for the middle and high school levels, prior performance is the average score of the students entering that particular school level (middle school grades always go back to 5th grade prior scores, and high school grades always go back to 8th grade prior scores.) This information is included to compare the growth in performance made possible by each school.
Prior Score - Prior score is a way to determine the prior preparation level of a group of students, through an average of their earlier test scores.
Proficiency Rate - A proficiency rate generally refers to a test standard that is considered more rigorous than the passing rate. In some states this proficiency rate is the one used to determine NCLB status, and in some states it is a harder standard for students to reach. NCEA has a typically promoted the use of these higher standards because they are a more reliable measure of a student’s preparation for the next grade level.
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Rank (Individual Performance Rank) - For each tested subject, grade, and year in the analysis (i.e. 4th grade Reading in 2005), a school's relative performance (the residual) is ranked within 1 of 4 possible low income groups (schools with 0-25% low income students, 25-50% low income students, 50-75% low income students, or 75-100% low income students.) These resulting percentile ranks make it possible to place the relative performance on a scale from 0 to 99. A rank of 99 indicates that the school's performance was better than 99% of it's demographic peers in that particular grade, subject, and year, and a rank of 0 indicates that it was better than 0%.
Rank (Overall Performance Rank) - A rank representing a school's performance in a single subject across multiple grades and years (i.e. all tested Reading grades from 2003-2005). The overall performance rank is a percentile rank that is calculated in the same manner as the individual performance rank, but which ranks a school's average relative performance in the subject across multiple grades and years.
Rank Groups - In order to more fairly compare schools, when calculating an individual performance rank, a school's relative performance (the residual) is ranked among campuses with similar percentages of low income students. As long as there are enough schools in the state, four ranking groups will be used: schools with 0-25% low income students, 25-50% low income students, 50-75% low income students, and 75-100% low income students.
Regression Analysis - A statistical tool used to compare the performance of a school to those that are demographically similar. When we say that a value was “taken into consideration in the regression,” it was used as one of the comparison tools.
Relative Performance - A school's relative performance is the distance between their performance on a particular exam and the average performance of demographically similar schools on the same exam. When the data are available, the measure of performance for schools will be their average scale score on a particular exam (i.e. 4th grade Reading in 2005.) When these data are not available, performance rates indicating the percent of students who passed the test at a particular level will be substituted as the measure of performance. For every campus, relative performance is calculated for each tested subject, grade, and year. Relative performance is also referred to as the residual.
Residual - A school's relative performance is the distance between their performance on a particular exam and the average performance of demographically similar schools on the same exam. When the data are available, the measure of performance for schools will be their average scale score on a particular exam (i.e. 4th grade Reading in 2005.) When these data are not available, performance rates indicating the percent of students who passed the test at a particular level will be substituted as the measure of performance. For every campus, relative performance is calculated for each tested subject, grade, and year. Relative performance is also referred to as the relative performance.
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Scale Score - A scale score places performance on each state exam on the same scale, and is used to determine whether each student passed, and if so, at what level.
Scatterplot - The scatter plots show the performance distribution of all campuses in the state for one particular grade, subject, and year with respect to schoolwide low income. The line through the graph marks the average performance at each low income level: the selected school's distance above or below the line demonstrates their performance in relation to schools with similar percentages of low income students.
Selection Criteria - The selection criteria are the set of rules used to define a comparable school.
Selective Admission Magnet School - A selective admission magnet school has at least 25% of its students admitted through testing procedures.
Self-Audit - The Self-Audit Tool is a survey that uses The Best Practice Framework to help educators compare their practices to higher performing districts, schools and classrooms. The Self-Audits are organized around the NCEA Best Practice Framework, based on the study of nearly 500 schools across the country. The Self-Audits, which are free to use, are most effective when completed by a large group of educators in a school system (district, school, and classroom levels).
Similar Schools - Similar schools are those where demographic conditions are considered comparable. These conditions include the school wide percentages of low income students, the enrollment of the school, and several ethnicity percentages. The exact demographics under consideration may vary from state to state and level to level based on trends within the state and on the data available there.
Site Visit - Site visits are conducted at higher and average performing schools using a rigorous methodology to find the practices that differentiate these two types of schools. Site visits consist of scripted interviews with teachers, principals and district personnel, as well as x, y and z.
State Standard - A state standard is the passing/proficiency rate used to analyze and compare school performance within a particular state.
Subgroup - A subgroup is the collection of students whose test scores are averaged together, and is generally defined by their similar levels of prior performance (i.e. 7th graders who were at or above passing levels in 6th grade versus students who were before passing levels in 6th grade.)
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The Framework - See Best Practice Framework
Theme - Five organizing themes provide the primary structure for studying the practices of high-performing school systems; 1) Curriculum and Academic Goals, 2) Staff Selection, Leadership, and Capacity Building, 3) Instructional Programs, Practices, and Arrangements, 4) Monitoring: Compilation, Analysis, and Use of Data, 5) Recognition, Intervention, and Adjustment. The themes provide the broad overview to connect practices across different school system levels and represent the major content areas in which practices of high-performing school systems differ from their average-performing counterparts.
Top Comparable Schools - Top comparable schools are the best five to ten schools in a particular tested subject, grade and year, who also have comparable demographics to your school. Again, these schools are identified separately for every school, for each tested grade, subject and year independently. The average performance of these schools is averaged, and the difference between that average and your school’s performance in the same subject, grade and year is called your opportunity gap.