Highland Tech High - Anchorage School District Charter School
Highland Tech High - Anchorage School District Charter School
As you might know, I have a fetish for the School of the Future, a Microsoft sponsored school based on project learning. You might also suspect that I am a bit sceptical of its curriculum, but we have to wait on the test scores to see.
But... while researching Anchorage schools, I came across the School of the Future's Alaskan clone. It's called Highland Tech.
Highland Tech, according to the website is an alternate charter school that utilizes project based learning, comprehensive assessments and community immersion. It invites local business leaders to evaluate students work. Computers and technology are heavily integrated into subjects. Student also move through the courses at their own pace, and can only move on once they have demonstrated mastered a course. They don't have grades, they have proficiency levels. Conceivably, a student could whiz through the curriculum and graduate in 3 years.
It sounds pretty cutting edge. Obviously it is a model school... right?
Not so fast there. Lets check out there test scores.
82.4%, 84.6%, and 80.4% of their students were proficient in reading, writing, and math respectively. This is roughly comparable to the school district which has proficiency levels of 76.4%, 90.8%, and 79.9%. It appears that Highland Tech is no better than the local school district at improving proficiency.
Of course proficiency scores often hide real performance, since proficiency is just an arbitrary line drawn to say that the kids are at least above some certain level. If we look at the breakdown of the scores, we can see a lot more.
Perhaps the best indicator of the quality of education a school provides is its average scale score growth between two consecutive grades in a cohort of students. Luckily, Anchorage's profile of performance gives us these numbers.
Here are the score differences between the same group of students tested in one grade in 2005 and the next grade in 2006.
6th to 7th grades
Reading -11.5
Writing -.08
Math -26.7
7th to 8th grades
Reading +4.2
Writing +4.5
Math +0.5
8th to 9th
Reading -11.5
Writing -0.8
Math -19.8
9th to 10th
Reading -0.7
Writing +9.5
Math -2.0
It is sort of hard to interpret scale score growth, but I am not impressed. The school seems to struggle particularly in math instruction.
Perhaps we should check out proficiency levels compared to the district instead.
Reading
Advanced 26.7% to 35.6% in the district
Proficient 54% to 46.7% in the district
Writing
Advanced 3.9% to 9.6% in the district
Proficient 68.5% to 67.7% in the district
Math
Advanced 12.4% to 27.5% in the district
Proficient 42.4% to 38.5% in the district
Just in case you were wondering, demographically the school pretty much mirrors the local school district.
It appears that the advanced students suffer the most, especially in math.
Now, some of you will be saying that these test scores could be affected by lots of other factors skewing the results. If the school does a great job of keeping their low performing students in school, wouldn't that affect their overall average? Well of course it would, so let's take a look at their graduation and dropout rates.
School Dropout Rate: 13.6% District: 6.28%
School Graduation Rate: 43.2% District: 63.9%
Damn... that sucks.
I think from the numbers that I have shown, we can conclude that the whole project based learning deal isn't all that its cracked up to be.
Have a great day!
