School board member digs in on tough issues

Wow. A recently elected school board member is really thinking hard about using VA results. Our local school board has been scheduling monthly VA briefings for the assessment subcommittee as we work to develop a statewide VA model for Wisconsin.

We are working to integrate our work with the Milwaukee and Madison school districts to show how the results and analysis differ in large and mid-size districts. We are also working with a regional service agency to explore the best ways to report results to small districts. Small districts have unique challenges for statistical analysis of VA given their low student counts. We will be looking at grouping similar rural districts into "quasi" districts to extract more explanatory power from the models.

Chris