Milestones Achievement, 2018

2018 Milestones results were released on July 27, 2018. The visual below uses school data files from GADOE to show achievement levels by school.

Use the filters on the right to focus on a specific grade or subject, or to switch to elementary schools. Use the tab at the top to switch to End of Course exams (high school). The End of Course results include all test administrations that occurred throughout the year. Note that middle school algebra I and physical science results are under the EOC tab and not included in the EOG tab. Users can also use the “System” filter to view data for other districts.

The graph shows the percentage of students scoring proficient and above, but this can also be changed using the “Achievement Level” filter. Achievement results tend to be highly correlated with family income- see our previous post on poverty and test scores.

The achievement level view is great for understanding how students compare to state standards and to other APS schools. The description of each state achievement level is available here. For a summary of overall APS performance, see the superintendent’s blog.

The next view converts average test scores for each school into a state percentile. This view is more helpful for comparing performance over time, across grades and subjects, and to the rest of the state.

The percentiles show a school’s relative position among all Georgia schools. For example, Burgess-Peterson’s 2018 average 5th grade English score is in the 79th percentile. This means their average scale score is as high or higher than 79% of schools in Georgia. This is an increase from 42 in 2017. For a more detailed description of the percentile view, see our previous percentile post.

The “choose metric” filter on the right can be used to switch from state percentiles to more traditional achievement measures. The “label all points” filter can be sed to add a label for each year, which is helpful for presentations or printing.

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Data Notes

Both of these visuals use the state public files. This allows us to provide the option of selecting any school in the state, but has a couple drawbacks.

  • The EOG views do not include EOC, so schools with a large advanced math program like Inman tend to have a lower 8th grade math percentile on the EOG view.
  • Conversely, the Algebra I views for Drew and Classical include their eighth grade advanced students because the middle and high schools have the same school code.
  • Some EOC winter results in the public file are censored due to small N size. So the school average will not included these censored results and will be slightly different from views like Milestones vs. Challenge, which is calculated with internal student-level data.