General Statement Regarding Programs for At-risk Youth

Students are different; schools are different.  All students are expected to meet high standards, and all schools are accountable for helping them do so.  Some schools, however, do not consist of regular, naturally-formed student populations; that is, they do not serve geographical areas or feeder patterns, but serve artificially-formed groups of students who are, by definition, functioning far below local grade-level standards and are at risk of falling farther behind.  For such schools, a simple focus on the percentage of students meeting grade-level standards or some percentile point on an achievement test is not a very meaningful measure of school quality.  Furthermore, high student turnover rate renders the assessment results for many school difficult to interpret, if not unusable.  Finally, some schools have goals that are not directly related to the standards, per se.  Some of these schools are specifically designed to help students deal—in the short-run—with barriers to learning in addition to learning itself.  These schools do not ignore academics, but rather they focus on helping students overcome the problems and habits that have kept them from succeeding in traditional school programs.

The Following five-stage model assumes that:

• The quality of a school is totally a function of the progress of its students.  The best measure of school quality is one that uses multiple measures to tap all the relevant areas of student development.  It may use a weighted average of value-added (growth) evidence for all students at all stages.

• Although all students are progressing within more than one stage at a time, most of them have a dominant stage.  Therefore, for purposes of this accountability system it may be sufficient to assess the progress of most students in a more focused and efficient manner;

• Different schools have different patterns based on the diversity of their students.  Some could do OK just by focusing on stage 4; some should/could focus almost exclusively on stages 1 and 2, and some have such heterogeneous populations that they need to monitor progress within and across all stages.