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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2008 > October > 16
Thursday, October 16, 2008
New state superintendent ran the state’s worst underachieving district
Regular readers here at GOTB know I’ve written a lot about how school districts perform on state tests relative to the median income in the district. In a nutshell, I argue that districts who rank high in the state for test scores but low for median income are “overachievers.” Those that score low but have high median income are “underachievers.” (For background, see my recent column here and past blog post here.)
Using this approach, I took a look at Cleveland Heights, the school district run by Ohio’s new state superintendent of instruction Deborah Delisle. Here’s what I found — Delisle presided over Ohio’s most underachieving school district.
Cleveland Heights is a low performing district. I am not intimately familiar with it, but I understand it is a close-in suburb of Cleveland. If you can tell us more about it, please chime in with a comment because the data about Cleveland Heights suggests it is very unusual.
Here are the numbers — Cleveland Heights this year ranked 569th out of 610 school district for test performance, with a performance index score of 86.8 (Dayton, ranked last, has a score of 70). That puts it in the bottom 7 percent in the state. But Cleveland Heights’ median income of $39,404 ranks 102 — in the top 16 percent in the state.
The spread between the two rankings — 467 places — is by far the widest spread in the state. Thus, I would call Cleveland Heights Ohio’s most underachieving school district.
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