Aaron Pallas: "Progress" measurement on reports still random

Last year, Teachers College sociologist Aaron Pallas concluded that the city’s progress report formula generated results that were wildly inconsistent from year to year, to the point of statistical meaninglessness. Now a regular contributor to the GothamSchools community section, Pallas analyzed this year’s reports and found that nothing has changed.

Providing the scatter plot at the right, which compares the percentage of students at each school making a year of progress in reading from one year to the next, Pallas writes:

 The correlation between student progress from 2007 to 2008 and student progress from 2008 to 2009 is -.02, which is indistinguishable from zero.  This means that there really is no pattern to the results, and certainly not a pattern that demonstrates consistency or stability from one year to the next.

Read Pallas’s complete analysis of this year’s reports here.