Could a Monkey Do a Better Job of Predicting Which Schools Show Student Progress in English Skills than the New York City Department of Education?
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Could a Monkey Do a Better Job of Predicting Which Schools Show Student Progress in English Skills than the New York City Department of Education?

By skoolboy — September 24, 2008 4 min read
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eduwonkette and I have been blogging about the School Progress Reports released last week by the New York City Department of Education. We’ve shown that, although the performance and environment scores of schools were pretty consistent from last year to this year, the student progress scores were virtually unrelated—knowing a school’s progress score from last year didn’t predict which schools would demonstrate a lot of progress this year. This, we argued, demonstrated that the progress part of the School Progress Report—representing 60% of the letter grade each school received—wasn’t really telling us which schools consistently are promoting student progress, but rather was mostly random error.

The problem was particularly acute in the domain of English Language Arts (ELA). The stability in the student progress scores from 2007 to 2008 was so low that it led skoolboy to wonder if a monkey could actually do a better job predicting which schools show progress in students’ ELA performance in 2008 than relying on the DOE’s 2007 student progress score. The particular measure I examined was the percentage of students in the school making at least one year of progress on the ELA test from last year to this year. (As we’ve noted in earlier posts, the calculation of this measure changed slightly from 2007 to 2008.)

In the interest of full disclosure, skoolboy didn’t actually rent a monkey to pick the schools. Animals scare him, and he wouldn’t have been able to record the picks while hiding under his bed. What I did instead was use a random number generator to assign each school to the top or bottom half of the distribution of schools on last year’s peer and citywide measures of the percentage of students making a year of progress in English Language Arts.

The DOE got credit for a correct prediction if it correctly predicted that a school would be in the top half of this year’s schools, based on the school being in the top half on the DOE’s 2007 measure, or correctly predicted that a school would be in the bottom half of this year’s schools, based on the school being in the bottom half last year. The monkey got credit for a correct prediction if the randomly-selected location of a school as being in the top half of the 2007 distribution correctly predicted that a school would be in the top half of this year’s schools, or the random pick of being in the bottom half of last year’s distribution correctly predicted that a school would be in the bottom half of this year’s schools. These predictions were done separately for the 570 elementary schools, 128 K-8 schools, and 289 middle schools which received overall letter grades last year and this year.

Round 1. We begin with the peer horizon score for the 570 elementary schools. The DOE’s peer horizon progress score from last year correctly predicted the progress status of 46% of the elementary schools this year. The monkey correctly predicted the status of 51% of this year’s schools.

Score: Monkey 1, DOE 0.

Round 2. We next turn to the citywide horizon score for the 570 elementary schools. The DOE’s citywide horizon progress score from last year correctly predicted the progress status of 47% of the elementary schools this year. The monkey correctly predicted the status of 52% of this year’s schools.

Score: Monkey 2, DOE 0.

Round 3. In this round, we examine the peer horizon scores for the 128 K-8 schools. The DOE’s peer horizon progress score from last year correctly predicted the progress status of 45% of the K-8 schools this year. The monkey correctly predicted the status of 55% of this year’s schools.

Score: Monkey 3, DOE 0.

Round 4. Next, we look at the citywide horizon progress scores for the 128 K-8 schools. The DOE’s citywide horizon progress score from last year correctly predicted the progress status of 43% of the K-8 schools this year. The monkey correctly predicted the status of 47% of this year’s schools.

Score: Monkey 4, DOE 0.

Round 5. The final stage of the competition examines the 289 middle schools. The DOE’s peer horizon progress score from last year correctly predicted the progress status of 40% of the middle schools this year. The monkey correctly predicted the status of 50% of this year’s middle schools.

Score: Monkey 5, DOE 0.

Round 6. The last round looks at the citywide horizon progress scores for the middle schools. The DOE’s citywide horizon progress scores from last year correctly predicted the progress status of 45% of this year’s middle schools. The monkey correctly predicted the status of 49% of this year’s middle schools.

Score: Monkey 6, DOE 0.

skoolboy will forego the cheap jokes about how a monkey could do a better job of managing New York City’s accountability system than the people currently in charge. On the whole, they’re smart, hard-working people, and ridiculing them is not likely to persuade them to change their behavior (as satisfying as it may be at particular moments.) But the system that they have designed and implemented is profoundly flawed, as this comical example illustrates, and it needs to change. eduwonkette and I are going to keep hammering on this point, because it has such important consequences for students and for schools.

And besides: I bet the DOE would beat the monkey in predicting school progress scores in math. (But it wouldn’t be a rout.)

The opinions expressed in eduwonkette are strictly those of the author(s) and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Editorial Projects in Education, or any of its publications.