Score:
Connecticut’s accountability system incentivizes both academic achievement and growth over time.
Both indicators make up more than half of the summative rating. Connecticut has created a thoughtful growth model that evaluates the change in a student’s scale score from year to year against pre-established targets. While this method sets ambitious growth targets fixed to a pre-determined criteria, and it expects students at lower incoming performance levels to make faster growth, this model is not explicitly pegged to grade-level targets.
This may not be an issue except that Connecticut’s choice of an achievement index uses scale scores on a sliding basis, without any extra incentive for students to meet the state’s grade-level standards. That model would allow some students to compensate for others and may hide lower-performing students, and it means Connecticut has not embedded grade-level benchmarks into its proposed system in any way.
