Great St. Louis School Article - Terrible Way to Show the Data!

Today stltoday.com (i.e. the Post-Dispatch) had a very informative article posted about the new Missouri standards from the Department of Elementary & Seconary Education for rating the performance of schools. The new system (called the MSIP5)  uses a 140 point system to rate all the school districts to determine how well they are doing. The Post article lists all the schools in a big chart that could be sorted either alphabetically or by percentage, but you truly cannot see the big picture without charting them all out like I did above. A similar article on KMOX contained hardly any data at all. In reality the vast majority of the school districts are doing a fine job with 43 out of 53 fulfilling 80% of the requirements and 47 out of 53 fulfilling 70% of the requirements. There are only six districts not meeting at least 70% of the state goals. Three of those are very close, Ferguson-Florissant at 69.3%, University City at 66.8% and Jennings at 65.7%. To meet 70% (the level for "provisional accreditation") requires 98 of 140 points and Ferguson-Florissant at 69.3% must be at 97 of 140 which means they only need to earn one more point to hit that goal. Similarly U City must be at 93.5 of 140 so they only need 4.5 more, and Jennings at 92 must meet 6 more points. The number of goal points to reach for Riverview Gardens, St. Louis City and Normandy, however, look very daunting. They have met only 40, 34.5 and 15.5 of the 140 goal points respectively, and with the new accreditation rules will require 50% or 70 points to be met, just to be "provisionally accredited". To reach those goals, Riverview needs 30, SLPS needs 35.5 and Normandy needs 54.5 more points to become "provisional" and then another 28 points after that to become fully accredited.

On the top of the scale, Parkway's 99.6% actually means it missed only 1/2 of one of the 140 goal points, but we have no idea which one it is. Lindbergh missed one whole point (or perhaps two half points) and then both Clayton and Ladue are down 1.5 out of the 140 maximum goal points. You can see how the rest of them play from there. To be a district of "distinction" requires 90% of the points or a score of 126 out of 140. Out of the 53 districts, 25 of them are already at 90% and several others are very close. Not surprisingly all three of the districts selected by Normandy and Riverview Gardens are comfortably above 90% (Kirkwood at 98.2%, Francis Howell at 96.4% and Mehlville at 92.5%) so the administrators did select them well.