The Kettering City School District has been ranked seventh best among 612 Ohio school districts and 200 charter schools in a measurement of “Value Added” performance.

The rating, released by the Ohio Department of Education last week, measures student improvement or the “value” gained over a given time period — “how much your district’s or your school’s kids grew under your tutelage that year,” according to Kettering superintendent James Schoenlein. “It’s the true gauge of education effectiveness.”

Others in the top 100 were Brookville, 24th; Springboro, 27; Lebanon, 45; Lakota, 50; Versailles, 53, and Wayne Local (Waynesville), 82. Trotwood-Madison and Dayton City Schools were in the bottom dozen.

Several perenially high-ranking districts were well down on this new list: Oakwood, 426; Yellow Springs, 530; Beavercreek, 680, and Northmont, 700.

Bobby Moore, senior director of Battelle for Kids, a Columbus-based national not-for-profit that has developed standards for measuring school improvement in Ohio and other states, said “value-added data levels the playing field. Socio-economic demographics affect achievement data, but this is not true about value added. All students can learn a year’s worth of material. What this really represents is the magnitude and confidence of growth.”

Moore, a Dayton native who attended Dayton Public Schools, said Ohio has developed a system that communicates the amount of’ “expected growth” in each district. The rankings “should not be about naming, shaming or blaming. The important part of them is to identify schools with the highest ranking and try to learn from them.”

Schoenlein said his office “has already started getting questions about how we did it from districts around the state.”

Along with “great classroom teaching and administrators focusing laser-like on student learning growth,” he said, Kettering uses “data to identify kids who need help and builds intervention structures that funnel expert help to them in a timely fashion. We also make a sustained effort to grow our gifted kids. If any district is to do well with value added, it must grow all kids.”

In announcing the distinction, he told teachers and staff, “the accomplishment is awfully close to a miracle. We did this with a very diverse student body with a 41 percent free and reduced lunch rate. We did it on a flat budget.”

Value added has become one of the criteria for achieving the state’s Excellence with Distinction rating for school districts, which Kettering received in 2012.

Oakwood, which received that rating for several years in a row, was rated a notch lower at Excellent in 2012, as were other districts including Beavercreek, Northmont, Yellow Springs and Mason.

“Oakwood and Beavercreek, for example, are both high-achieving districts that grew their students a year” (in value-added data), Moore said.

“There are also high-achieving districts that grow their students more than expected. With high-achieving districts, we have noticed that sometimes there are very high cohorts of students from one grade level to the next. We cannot do business as usual for these students. Instead of just covering the curriculum, we need to meet these students where they are,” he said.

Complete value-added ratings, along with state and local district report cards, are available online at www.reportcard.ohio.gov.