LA School Report: Green Dot’s experience shows LAUSD was right to release student growth data because it’s a more meaningful measure of student success

We are pleased that the LAUSD Board of Education earlier this month approved the release of school-specific data that includes student growth among its measures — parents, students and the community will benefit from this improved way of judging schools. We hope the state will follow by including growth data in the California School Dashboard; based on our experience at Green Dot, doing so would far more accurately, effectively and helpfully measure the progress being made by students, teachers and schools.

The broadest of these lessons is that growth data, which incorporate the state’s standard accountability metrics, far more accurately reflects how individual students are performing in the classroom and how they are improving — or the opposite, which is as important to identify — as they progress through school. We have seen this again and again, year after year. By adopting the CORE Academic Growth Model — used by the CORE districts of Fresno, Garden Grove, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco and Santa Ana — Green Dot has been able to avoid misleading conclusions of how students and schools are doing.