The Georgia Department of Education (GaDOE) released its 2023 College and Career Ready Performance Index (CCRPI) report on Dec. 14, for schools and school districts.
This is the last in a series of reports that were released this summer and fall by the state that included students’ achievement levels on the Georgia Milestones Assessment System (GMAS), four-year graduation rates, and the College Board’s Advanced Placement, SAT and ACT scores. Based on student achievement on the GMAS, the GaDOE designated 79 schools as Title I Distinguished Schools, including Brooklet Elementary School. Distinguished Schools are among the highest-performing 5% of Title I schools statewide.
The 2023 College and Career Ready Performance Index scores for Georgia show improvements in Content Mastery, with the highest of the five component scores being in Progress and Readiness. In comparison, the overall district CCRPI scores for Bulloch County Schools’ are either comparable or above the state’s scores in 9 of the 13 combined elementary, middle and high school component areas.
Bulloch County outperformed the state in the majority of the CCRPI’s component areas for each grade segment - elementary, middle, and high schools. The school district significantly outperformed the state in the Closing the Gap component. Also, Bulloch County’s four-year graduation rate of 89.10% is higher than the state’s rate of 84.9%. In fact all three high schools increased their graduation rates and outperformed the state rate with Portal increasing its rate to 93.3%, Southeast Bulloch rising to 91.60%, and Statesboro improving to 86.90%. Bulloch County’s results for Content Mastery, Progress and Readiness all closely mirrored the state’s results.
As part of its post-COVID recovery plan, Bulloch County Schools increased its focus on providing multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) for students, professional learning communities for faculty, literacy improvement through guided reading, and student attendance interventions. The district’s Data Support Department hosted a data dig for all school principals on Dec. 6, to guide them in analyzing their schools CCRPI data by grade levels and subgroups, make comparisons with state and district data, observe trends, and describe possible reasons for low or high performance. The district will continue to invest in academic recovery.
2023 CCRPI Scores
Graduation Rates
State changes to the CCRPI scale
The CCRPI no longer includes an overall, 0-100 score for schools, districts, or the state. According to the Georgia Department of Education, this change was first implemented in 2022 under an addendum received from the U.S. Department of Education. It was made permanent this year under an amendment to Georgia’s Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) plan. Information about the changes approved under this amendment is available here.
“I have long said that the CCRPI’s 100-point single score vastly oversimplified the complicated factors that influence school quality,” Superintendent Woods said in a press release issued by the Georgia Department of Education on Dec. 14. “With this change, the CCRPI is more like the ‘report card’ it was always intended to be – encouraging schools, families, and communities to dig into the data and both celebrate achievements and address issues that tended to be obscured by the single score.”
Components of the College & Career Ready Performance Index
The CCRPI is made up of five individual components: Content Mastery, Progress, Closing Gaps, Readiness, and Graduation Rate for high schools. Each of these components still has a 0-100 score. The Georgia Department of Education made this change, with approval from the U.S. DOE, in order to “increase transparency and provide a more complete picture of school performance, ensuring that challenges and opportunities are not hidden behind a single score.”
- Content Mastery - Measures how well students grasp key academic concepts in academic subjects, assessed through the Georgia Milestones Assessment System and the Georgia Alternate Assessment (GAA) 2.0. Imagine it as a snapshot of a student's understanding at a particular point in time.
- Progress - Tracks individual student growth in reading and math compared to their expected progress, accounting for prior achievement compared to their similarly academic peers across the state. Think of it as measuring a student's learning trajectory over time.
- Closing Gaps - Evaluates the effectiveness of schools in narrowing academic achievement disparities between different student groups, like race, ethnicity, socioeconomic background, or students with disabilities. It's like checking if all students are progressing at a similar pace, regardless of their background.
- Readiness - Assesses how prepared students are for the next grade level or higher education, based on performance on specific academic benchmarks (on-grade level reading, attendance, accelerated enrollment, college and career readiness). It's like gauging a student's preparedness for the next challenge.
- Graduation Rate - Measures the percentage of students who graduate from high school within four years or five years. It's like the finish line of the K-12 race, indicating the proportion of students who reach the goal.
Schools targeted for improvement
After further review of the statewide data, the Georgia Department of Education will release in January its 2023-2024 lists of comprehensive support and improvement schools (CSI) and targeted support and improvement schools (TSI). Bulloch County Schools had two schools on the state’s TSI list for 2022-2023, Langston Chapel Elementary and Langston Chapel Middle School. This was due to mastery of content by their students with disabilities whose scores on state assessments consistently showed that the children were underperforming in their mastery of academic content. This placed both schools in the lowest 5% of all schools in the state in at least 50% of the CCRPI’s content mastery and readiness components.
According to the state, schools identified for support and improvement last year did not necessarily mean that the schools were not improving or making progress, as many schools identified last year served children who were disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. At each of these schools, 100% of the students are considered economically disadvantaged, more than 75% represent a minority, and more than 16% of the students have a documented disability.
Bulloch County’s 2023 CCRPI data for the two Langston Chapel schools does show an increase in the Content Mastery scores, and both schools have met their improvement targets for students with disabilities. The district will learn in January if this success will remove the schools from the state’s Targeted Support and Improvement list.
The progress at the Langston Chapel schools is a result of how the principals and teachers at the schools have worked with the district and state to make improvements. This included additional support from Bulloch County Schools’ school improvement directors, instructional coaches, school climate coaches and an assigned state effectiveness specialist. The schools are also using specially designed instruction with its students who have needs that require an individualized education plan (IEP). This will further help these students access the general education curriculum by addressing the unique needs a student may have due to a disability.
The schools also received additional Title I, Part A 1003 School Improvement Funds which allowed the faculty from both schools to participate in professional development and coaching with a national trainer from Corwin Press. This training will directly impact students as it develops teachers' ability to understand and communicate academic standards in a student-friendly way so that students know what is expected for mastery of each standard. Professional development and coaching for faculty began in July 2023 and will continue through the 2023-2024 school year.
Chronic absenteeism still affects student achievement
These unexcused absences are not related to COVID or absences that were excused by a parent or doctor's note. Research shows that missing 10% of the school year, or about 18 days, negatively affects a child’s academic performance. This is just two days a month and it’s known as chronic absenteeism. Beginning with the 2022- 2023 school year, Bulloch County Schools began using additional strategies to reduce the number of unexcused student absences. The district has communicated its attendance expectations, and it has provided a tool on each school’s website to help families submit absence excuses online to reduce unexcused absences. In addition, it promotes the benefits of positive attendance, and works with faculty attendance support teams. Schools recognize students with good and improved attendance and share positive attendance messages with families as well.
Why is the CCRPI necessary?
Under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), each U.S. state is required to have a statewide accountability system that complies with federal requirements and provides a snapshot of how well schools performed during a fiscal school year. The CCRPI meets that requirement for Georgia, and it satisfies requirements for school accountability in state law. More information about the CCRPI and frequently asked questions is available here.
Editor’s notes on comparability
Components for Progress, Closing the Gaps, and Readiness were not calculated in 2022 due to pandemic-related data limitations. Readiness component scores are also not comparable from 2022 to 2023 because changes were made in 2023 to align the literacy indicator to the metric already used for Georgia Milestones.
