It is important to understand that the Iowa School Report Card ratings / rankings do not represent a complete picture of a school. The Iowa School Report Card is one tool to help Iowans understand how their schools are doing. Schools can use it to identify strengths and challenges, as well as strategies to address those challenges.
The Iowa School Report Card scores schools on various educational measures and assigns an overall rating to each school based on certain performance on measures. Here are the six categories of ratings: Exception, High Performing, Commendable, Acceptable, Needs Improvement and Priority.
Proficiency: The percentage of students scoring proficient or better on reading and mathematics assessments.
Closing Achievement Gap: A measure that reflects a statewide goal of narrowing the gap in achievement for students with disabilities, students who are eligible for free and reduced-price meals, and English Language Learners. Two categories were added to this measure in 2016 to include information on achievement gaps by race and ethnicity.
College and Career-Ready Growth: The percentage of students who are making the year-to-year growth necessary to be ready for college and career training by the end of high school.
Annual Expected Growth: The percentage of students making a year of academic growth in a year’s time on reading and mathematics assessments.
Attendance: The average daily attendance of students, which is the total number of days students were enrolled and present divided by the total number of possible attendance days.
Staff Retention: The percentage of teachers, school administrators and other licensed staff members who remained employed in a school over consecutive school years.
Teacher Survey of Parent Involvement: This measure is informational and is not included in school scores or ratings. It is a summary of responses to a statewide survey of Iowa teachers on their practices and perceptions regarding parent involvement. Parent involvement eventually will become a scored measure on the Iowa School Report Card.
Important “weighting” note for scoring: Per Iowa Department of Education, for high schools, 77.7% of the overall score is based on the Iowa Assessment scores for reading and math; for middle schools, 87.4%; for elementary schools, 85.8%. Also, elementary schools are rated on 6 different measures, middle schools on 7 measures and high schools on 8 of the measures listed above with proficiency (HS – 22.2%, MS – 25% Elem – 28.6%) and closing the achievement gap (HS – 22.2%, MS – 25%, Elem. 28.6%) receiving the most significant overall weighting between the categories.
Click on Iowa School Report Card logo for information on how West Branch Schools are performing.
Here are the links to the West Branch Community School District’s Iowa School Report Card “school performance rankings.” Note: Each year, changes have been made to the calculations upon the entry of additional information or collection processes.
The Iowa Department of Education has opened a new website that provides Iowans a snapshot of how our public schools and school districts are performing in two areas: student proficiency rates and growth toward college and career readiness. The website enables users to look up this information for any public school or district, including our district. The website is located at http://reports.educateiowa.gov/acr.
Student proficiency rates report the percentages of students proficient in math and reading in grades 3-8 and 11 based on state assessment results.
Growth toward college and career readiness is the percentage of students who, in a given year, met a growth target towards becoming college and career ready. The growth measure sets an expectation that all students will make progress each year and will be ready for college by the end of 12th grade. Growth targets are calculated for each student. The growth percentage for a district or school represents the numbers of students that made adequate progress toward college and career readiness. For example, if a school has 100 students and 50 students met their growth targets, 50 percent of students would be on track for college and career readiness. The measure for college readiness that has been chosen by the Department of Education is a standard score of 306 on the Iowa Assessments, which corresponds to a 21 on the ACT Reading test, and a 22 on the ACT Math test.
The Department of Education attendance center rankings show results for 2015-16 and for 2016-17, one year at a time. We have posted various student achievement reports on our website, showing results for all students and for various subgroups, with eight years of data displayed together on the same graph, allowing the reader to see patterns over time.