THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 2, 1995 TAG: 9503310308
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SERIES: School Report Card
SOURCE: Elizabeth Thiel
LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines
Our methods for comparison
It's tough to compare Chesapeake's schools to Suffolk's.
Chesapeake is a growing city of more than 33,000 students. Suffolk is a rural town with less than 10,000 schoolkids. A quarter of Chesapeake's students live in poverty; half of Suffolk's kids do.
Still, people traditionally have checked on school systems' performance by comparing them with their neighbors.
A Virginian-Pilot computer analysis shows that there might be a different way.
The analysis grouped Hampton Roads school districts with other districts statewide that were reasonably similar on five demographic characteristics, weighted equally: transience, measured by the percentage of people who remained in the same home from 1985-90; the percentage of people in the locality who were high school graduates; the composite index, a measure of a locality's tax base; average daily membership, a formula for a school system's enrollment; and the percentage of students who qualify for the federal free and reduced-price lunch program, a measure of a school district's poverty level.
The figures came from school districts and the 1990 census.
The analysis was based on an almost identical method used by the Virginia Department of Education in the late 1980s to group school divisions with similar demographics for the purpose of comparing their performance on the state's annual report card.
Department officials dropped the groupings, however, after some school districts complained about being compared to others.
``I think it's probably a pretty good method,'' said E. Sidney Vaughn III, an assessment specialist for Virginia Beach schools.
But Vaughn and other area school officials raised some cautions.
The diverse natures of the 134 school districts statewide makes it difficult to create groups of districts that are truly similar. The computer analysis, for example, groups Chesapeake with Spotsylvania County, an area with less than half the students and a significantly smaller number of kids in poverty.
``The problem is, we have such a variation within our own city,'' said Chesapeake Superintendent C. Fred Bateman. One statistic or group of statistics could oversimplify the very complex natures of most school divisions, he said.
``I'm not filled with fear about the comparison,'' said K. Edwin Brown, Virginia Beach's assistant superintendent for instruction. ``But I think you could make a valid point that no school division is exactly like ours.'' MEMO: Main story on page 12. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic with map
by CNB