Evaluating HCPSS Elementary School Performance
A Multi-Year Review of Proficiency, Performance, and Per-Pupil Spending - 2018 to 2024
Introduction
The Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) is a public education government agency responsible for overseeing the state's public schools. Every year the MSDE releases a report card for each public school in the state. The report card includes demographic data, various achievement scores, and proficiency metrics for each school. Additionally, the report card includes per-student expenditure data, broken down by source of funding—state/local and federal. The data are provided for elementary, middle and high school levels of all counties. In this report, the elementary school data for the Howard County Public School System (HCPSS) is presented.
The Maryland School Report Card
Overall School Performance
A typical Maryland school report card is comprised of a measure of the overall school performance, which is an aggregation of four factors. Each school’s report card provides the score achieved for each of the four factors with a subsequent breakdown of how each score is reached.
The state website provides report cards for five years—2018, 2019, and 2022 through 2024. The MSDE website does not provide reports for 2020 and 2021, as the reporting was suspended for those years.
The following five charts compare the Total Points earned by each elementary school for the reported years. The Total Points earned as a percentage of Points Possible by summing up each of the four factors is provided.
The figures below also include the highest and lowest points earned. In 2018, Clarksville Elementary earned the highest total points, while Cradlerock Elementary earned the lowest points. This raises questions about the demographic or funding differences that might explain this performance gap.
Accordingly, the reader should note that the figures do not tell the whole story. Specifically, why does one school perform 33 points higher than another school? A future analysis will look at how various demographic and student group characteristics could affect these scores. For example, the percentage of students who qualify for free and reduced meals (FARM %) is correlated to these scores.
Math and English Language Arts (ELA) Proficiency Scores
According to the MSDE definition, the Academic Achievement composite score is made up of four factors: a) percentage of students scoring above a certain threshold on state English language arts (ELA) assessments, b) percentage of students scoring above a certain threshold on state mathematics assessments, c) a performance index for ELA assessments, and d) a performance index for mathematics assessments. Each of the factors is scored out of five (5) points.
The MSDE report card pulls out two of the four factors and separately provides the percentage of students proficient on state ELA and mathematics assessments, with disaggregated data by race, socio-economic status and disability status.
The following figures compare the percent of All Students proficient on state ELA and mathematics assessments in each elementary school for each of the years reported by the state report cards.
The first set of comparisons are for state math assessments. The figures also identify the schools with the highest and lowest percentage of students performing at or above proficiency on the state math assessments.
As the snapshot MSDE report card shows, the percent of students who are proficient or higher changes by race. In this particular snapshot white students scored higher in math proficiency, while economically disadvantaged students scored the lowest. Economically disadvantaged students could also be disaggregated by race to identify the percent of white students versus other students who are economically disadvantaged. The state website states that “Maryland uses students receiving free and reduced priced meals for this measure.”
The second set of comparisons are for state ELA assessments. The figures also identify the schools with the highest and lowest percentage of students performing at or above proficiency on the state ELA assessments.
State/Local and Federal Per-Pupil Expenditure
According to the MSDE website:
School-level per-pupil expenditures are local school system actual personnel and actual non-personnel operating expenditures directly attributed to schools or allocated to schools based on certain criteria and reported as a per-pupil or per-student amount.
The website states that the data can vary across schools due to many factors, including the number of students enrolled in the school, specific school-based programs, and the experience level of staff at the school.
The figures below provide the per-pupil expenditure levels by spending type for each year across all schools for the consecutive years 2019 through 2023. The figures also include the highest and lowest per-pupil expenditure by spending type. Note that the highest or lowest state and local funding recipients may differ from the highest or lowest federal funding recipients.
A notable trend across all years is that the share of highest state and local funding as a percentage of total funding is less than that of the lowest state and local funding recipients. By the same token, the share of highest federal funding as a percentage of total funding is higher than the lowest federal funding recipients.
Conclusion
The MSDE tracks student achievement for all Maryland public schools. Here the overall school performance, proficiency levels, and per-student school funding data for the 42 elementary schools in HCPSS are presented. It is clear from this report that some schools perform better than others and some schools receive more funding per-student than others. However, this report only presents the what and not the why. As stated, it only tells part of the story and a deep-dive analysis of the impact of various demographic, economic and other student-level characteristic factors is needed to paint a more complete picture, which is performed in a future report.