Education Commons^™

Identifying Exceptionally Performing Third Grades In Indiana: Who Is To Blame?, Emily Troyer

Honor Scholar Theses

Federal and state governments want to know that their constituents' tax dollars are being spent well, and that public education is serving the People well. To assess a school's efficacy, they calculate an accountability score. Although state-level scoring systems vary, neither the federal law nor a single state's law require that demographic characteristics of a school's student population be held constant when it is being evaluated. This complicates the assessment of a school's adequacy because factors outside of a school's control influence student performance; when a school is evaluated without taking this into account, it is being unfairly credited with …