charts you can trust By Anne Hyslop
Data That Matters: Giving High Schools Useful Feedback on Grads’ Outcomes Angelique Simpson Marcus, the principal of Largo High School, knew her students. For five years she had taught health and physical education at the Prince George’s County, Md., school before serving in a number of administrative positions at other schools and then returning to Largo as principal in 2007. Although Largo consistently failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, Simpson Marcus knew there was more to the school’s story of student achievement. AYP considered only quantitative data like test scores and graduation rates, not the anecdotal evidence of success that Simpson Marcus had been collecting as she informally followed her students after graduation. “Where’s your brother or sister?” she would ask current students. “Are they going to college? Did they finish?”1 From the resulting personal stories, she believed her students were entering and completing college at higher rates than those at other high schools in the county. But Simpson Marcus needed data to back her intuition. She got it from a University of Maryland System report that provided information on students enrolling in the state’s higher education system and the rates at which they needed to take remedial (or “developmental”) classes before moving on to credit-bearing work. Simpson Marcus was right; most Largo students were enrolling in college. But the numbers on how prepared they were for college were disheartening: of the high school’s graduates that enrolled in college, about 60 percent, it turned out, were forced into remediation. Simpson Marcus immediately went into diagnostic mode. “My thought was, OK, 60 percent of our students are taking remedial courses. We did not prepare them well. Is it the curriculum? Do we need to focus on writing? Do we need to focus on mathematics?” She wondered if the school was telling students that they were taking calculus and pre-calculus when they were actually getting watered-down versions of algebra 2 and trigonometry. She began to change the conversation around college readiness. Students, she said, needed “to understand that high school is the floor, not the ceiling.” Specifically, Simpson Marcus encouraged students to take Advanced Placement courses, to participate in a dual or concurrent enrollment program at the nearby community college, and to take four years of math, science, and social studies— more than what is required by Maryland law. The school also partnered with College Summit, a national nonprofit, to ensure that all students made a postsecondary plan and knew how to apply to college. The efforts seem to be paying off.
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