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Hi, we at Homer have created a tool called the Illinois School District report card data comparison tool that allows assessment of various Illinois school report card measures metrics and shows them in context of all the other schools and or districts in the state to kind of understand how you stack up. Whether you're a school or district with other school districts in the state. So to access this, please start at the Homer schools website.

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that's www.Homerschools.org. Again, www.Homerschools.org, and that will bring you to essentially this site here.

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Then from the top, under our district, click on the Illinois School Report Card Data Comparison Tool,

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and eventually that will load, and you should get to a page that looks like this.

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So the current version of the tool is version 28. You'll see the version numbers will increment when accessing them from this site.

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Occasionally the site is actually a little bit overloaded, and when that happens, we've

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been trying to find a place to mirror the site as well, so we may mirror it someplace

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else, may give you additional links at some point.

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But for the most part, that's how you get access to the website.

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So once there, you have a number of choices.

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So the first thing we want to look at is the different metrics that are available and I'll

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just go over them quickly.

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So we have from the metrics pull down here, we have ELA proficiency, math proficiency, growth, ELA growth and math growth for both the IAR, as well as high school assessment, which for this year 2025 happens to be the ACT.

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And then in addition to those, we also have the composite index scores, which are the actual scores that the state calculates that determines whether or not you would be a commendable exemplary or targeted.

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or other indicator in terms of higher school fairs

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in terms of a designation, a summative designation.

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Right now we're looking at ELA proficiency.

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We currently have three years of data, 2025, 2024,

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and 2023 in the, in the cycle.

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And then we have a couple of options for entities

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so we can look at things in terms of either districts

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or schools, we'll get into the details a little bit later.

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And then these checkboxes at the bottom are essentially filters.

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So by default, they're all turned on, so we would be seeing all districts that are marked as elementary districts, high school districts, unit districts, and then other.

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In other, there's only a few of those and essentially we're talking about things like the Illinois Math and Science Academy, the University of Illinois Lab School.

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I think there's a small number of entities that in this case fall under other.

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and then the other the other filter here has to do with locations so by default we have all counties turned on

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which is a superset of will county and cook in the color counties. If we turn off all counties for instance by clicking on that

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then we can still filter out by will county or cooking the other colors we can turn off will county which would then just give us

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cook county and the other colors aside from will or we turn everything off in which case we have no entries.

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So, since Homer isn't at Will County, this was an interesting filter to us, and then

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also our neighboring counties that we basically see as cook in the other

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colors, and then including Will, so that's kind of this, you know, Chicago's

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surrounding area that we use. If we turn those off, then basically we see all the

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districts or entities that would be in other counties throughout the state.

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I'm sorry, all counties throughout the state, so it doesn't matter, these are

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on or off at this particular point when all counties are turned on because that overrides

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and shows everybody.

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Underneath that, we have the highlight district pull down menu and in this case, by default,

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when we first load the page, it will go to Homer Glenn, Homer 33c, that's us.

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And that actually highlights our location, whatever district you pick in the grid so you can

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see as I scroll down the grid.

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There's Homer CCSD-33C looking at ELA proficiency.

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You can see that our actual proficiency percentage over here is 77.3%.

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If you rank these items in order in the grid that's shown, so this is a calculated number

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based on the entities that are shown here, there's 858 entities.

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In this list of 858 entities, that puts us at the 92nd percentile in terms of ELA proficiency

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for essentially all of the districts in the state of Illinois.

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That's how you can interpret this percentile rank.

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It's calculated on the fly, it doesn't come from data,

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and it's based on only what's actually in this grid of districts here.

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So if we were to minimize the number of districts we're comparing against,

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so right now again we're looking at all districts in the state,

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you can see 858 rows, 858 different districts are shown in this list.

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If we were to take that off and just look at, for instance, school districts and will,

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then our ELA proficiency ranking goes up to the 96 percentile.

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And you can see that we're only behind Frankfurt in this particular case in terms of

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will county only school districts, whether they be elementary or unit schools or high school districts.

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You can see the different school types in this section over here.

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So that's what the various filters do.

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So turning all this back on, let's just talk about the actual metrics here.

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So when you're looking at one of the metrics, whatever it happens to be,

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the results of that particular filtering

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for that metric is displayed in the table at the bottom.

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You can see the metric is over here in the far right column,

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along with the bar graph that kind of shows you how they stack up

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and from top to bottom.

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Now this table is actually

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Sortable so you might have noticed accidentally clicked on the LA proficiency, which immediately changed the sort order from

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Highest to lowest to lowest highest and click on it again to change that

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I can also change things based on for instance enrollment if I wanted to see the highest enrolled district

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So there's you know cps followed by sd

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You 46 you can kind of see how the enrollment of the districts is sortable here

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counties as well if I wanted to say everything just in Adams County. For instance

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they're the hour right there, the top ones. District type so I can sort by unit

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district going down through elementary and then probably in the middle here. There's

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high school districts and then there's the few others that we were talking about

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before that fall into a different category themselves. Obviously year for

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this particular case is going to be L 2025 so there's no reason to sort. It's

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It's all going to be the same.

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The one thing I should mention about the sorting as well is it builds upon itself.

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So if I were to sort for instance by ELA proficiency highest to lowest, and then I were to

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sort by for instance county, then I can see my highest to lowest in Adams County because

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of the order that I did it in.

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So with the Adams to county, those are the one, two, three, four, five school districts,

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and you can see how they rank highest to lowest in terms of ELA proficiency.

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see. Same for any other county, so here's Boone County, right? Just looking through this and we

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should be getting. I'm sorry, there's Boone County. There we go. Highest to lowest and then here's

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Bureau County. Apparently there's more schools in Bureau County. I don't know my counties that well,

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but you can see how it all goes highest to lowest. So if you wanted to do a kind of staggered sorting

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or want to top of another, pick the first area you want to sort by and then pick the second. So if I

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want to do see all the how the low income percentages stack up for all the

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districts in Bureau County. I can click on low income first and then sort by

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county second and then within Bureau right here, there's Bureau, there's my

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low income percentages from highest to lowest 80 down to 26.32 and then you can

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also see the the various ELA proficiency metrics that are tied with each of

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those over here on the right. So that's one way to use the sorting abilities

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within the grid. Again, by default, it shows up with ELAPE or the

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proficiency, whatever the metric is, sorted highest to lowest. And the other thing I

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should mention is you'll notice the percentile rank is calculated, but it

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follows the sort. So it's calculated once and it doesn't change on the sort. So if

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I change the low income rankings here, right, you see that the percentile

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rank is no longer, it's no longer sorted the way it was before. It's not like

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the top item is always going to be the 100 percent. It's showing the percentile rank as it was in

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that first list when we first pulled up the screen, which is in this particular order here by

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ELA proficiency. So the other piece I should mention is that when you're looking at a district like

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Homer CCSD-33C here, we have this histogram up at the top, which you can turn on and off with this

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little button here. If you don't want it, you can turn it off or turn it back on. By default, it will

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I will show all of the items ranked in terms of frequency,

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how many appear in each of these bands

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in terms of ELA proficiency,

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and this is the number of districts.

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So the height of the bar is the number of districts.

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And then I have the average mark on the histogram

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to give you an idea where the central tendency of that histogram is.

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54.16 in this particular case,

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for basically everybody that isn't in cooker or collar county,

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so all counties in Wilk County.

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I'm sorry, all counties.

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I should say all counties overrides everything and then where that particular selected district is in this case the highlighted

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District is 77.3 and if we scroll down the list here to 77.3 you can see there it is right there and it allows you to

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compare see who's right above you next to you above and below to kind of give you an idea of how you relate and then the

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gap here between the average and where you're actually at gives a good idea in terms of how maybe you're

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fairing in terms of the overall state average of districts.

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So that's ELA proficiency at the district level.

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The other metrics that we have in here, math proficiency, same situation.

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One thing you probably noticed is that when we changed from ELA proficiency here, looking

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at the histogram to math proficiency, you'll notice how it slid far to the left.

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That's because overall the district is a little bit, the state is a little bit lower in terms

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a math proficiency, the NELA proficiency. And what's interesting even more is that this is with the

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new cut scores and the new proficiency level benchmarks that came in for 2025. So if we look at

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2024 to get an idea of how things used to look, for instance, noticed that math was even further

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skewed to the left than it was for 2025 when they kind of eased up on the benchmark cut points

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for proficiency and the same is true for ELA if we looked at ELA for 2025

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versus 2024. You'll notice that the entire histogram skews significantly to

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the left for 2024 and it's not that different for 2023 it even goes a little bit

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further left but it's closer to 2024 than it is for 2025 which

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you jump significantly over to the right. In other words more districts are

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proficient in 2025 under the new cut points then they were in 2024 using the older ones,

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which makes sense. That was the purpose of the change. That would be true for any of the metrics

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that we basically use. Growth metrics as well. So here is IAR, HLA growth. So this is not high school

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high school metric. This is an elementary metric because it's only IAR. And you can see LLA growth

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and then kind of where the selected district shows that's the green bar and you can see it matches

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is down here, so there's the 62.8%. And always keep in context how many schools we're comparing

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against, they're looking at their 762 items in this particular list. And in this case, just for

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Homer, it's 18th out of 7.62. If we were going to look at, for instance, 2024, we still have

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an IAR growth metric. For 2023, however, we come up with zero because the data files from 2023

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three did not provide a ELA IR growth metric and a previous version of this tool I had incorporated

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the growth metric file that the state had provided on their website to try and basically

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figure this in. However, I have since found some concerns with the various growth files

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that were provided. So I decided just to work with the data that comes from the actual data

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data files that are supposed to mirror the Illinois Interactive Report Card data that

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are found on the website.

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So right now there is no growth data for 2023 at the district level for sure.

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So we have it for 2024, 2025.

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So if you ever run into a situation where something's missing, it's likely that that data wasn't

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in the main data files for that purpose.

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So there's growth.

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By the way, these are both cohort growth and baseline growth.

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There's two options in terms of growth.

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and the information that's reported on the IRC website is generally cohort growth, not baseline growth,

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but you can find the baseline growth numbers if you want. Again, it's in those other data files

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that I mentioned that are available on the state website. But I didn't incorporate those because

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of some complications that I found with them. So that's IR growth. We have the same thing for high

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school. In this case we only have 2025 data. If we go back to 2024 that was actually the SAT

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and at the ACT and the data that was provided at the time did not include growth benchmark

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for those schools. So it's not there. So the growth benchmarks are only there for 2025 for high

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school as opposed to some previous years for IAR benchmarks. The other thing I should mention

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is going back to the proficiency scores. So these are the overall ELA proficiency scores in terms of

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how the state categorizes or counts, all ELA proficiency.

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So in the case of the typical elementary school district,

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this would include high R proficiency

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as well as DLM proficiency.

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And then those are factored in and weighted

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to give you the overall ELA proficiency.

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So that's what we're looking at here.

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It's a combination combined proficiency

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against whatever tests they're used to measure that.

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It's not specific to just IAR or ACT for instance.

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it includes both of them. So the other score that's available on this in this

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tool is the composite index score. So in terms of a composite index score, they

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only exist at the school level so we have to change our entity type instead of

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looking at districts into schools. And the composite index score is actually that

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score which then equates to a particular designation, the exemplary commendable

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The composite index score is not available in the main IR data files. For our purposes, it had to actually be obtained via FOIA from the state, but they were actually obliging enough to provide that information. So that's how this information guide in here. It's based on some data files that we were able to obtain from the state. And you can see that, again, the percentile rank is not given.

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and it's calculated based on the data that's in this grid.

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So looking through, for instance, the exemplary,

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now we're looking at composite index scores,

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schools only, and this is for elementary.

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So this is essentially the elementary score,

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not for high schools.

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But looking through the list, you can see that these,

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so these are all your comparison schools, right?

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And then the composite index score.

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So these are the scores over here on the right,

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the 98.47, the ES index score, elementary school index score.

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And then this is the percentile rank

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if you actually use that formula to get a percentile rank for these.

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So going through, you can see, well, there's our particular, that's our junior high, right

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there, our own junior high, which we're very proud of, it's a relatively well ranked

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school.

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And then if we continue on, though, looking through exemplaries, going down to, for instance,

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where we basically change to commendable.

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So, in my calculations, as soon as we hit 90, that's where we basically wind up with

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our first commendable designation in schools.

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Arguably, the calculation should possibly have been under 90, but the way that the formula

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is working for me right now, at 90, basically is where we have that break.

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So that's how these two things equate.

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The exemplary and the commendable are not calculated.

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Those have been given to us by ISB.

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And then this percentile rank score, however,

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is calculated from the items that appear in this list.

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And all of these scores as well as these,

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I'm sorry, these designations as well as these scores

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were all obtained basically by FOIA

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from the Illinois State Board of Education.

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So looking through, you can basically get an idea

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of how a particular school or district ranks.

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I'm sorry, it wouldn't be a district because index scores are only available for schools.

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But a school ranks in comparison to other schools.

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And in this particular case, these would be all of the comparable schools, right?

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All of the schools that you actually were ranked against to come up with a designation.

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And there are 3,049 items in this particular data table.

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In, for instance, right now, once we change our entity type to schools, we get a new little

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option over here where it's a selected school and you can see right now we have

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homer junior high selected and that's actually why homer junior high I'm

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sorry on my list here it is not only highlighted but highlighted in red with

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red writing for the words. Our other district schools because the highlight

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district is still set for home of 33 C. Our other district schools are also

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highlighted but they don't have the red letters and they have a slightly

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different shade of green so as you're scrolling through this list you can find

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other schools that are in your district so you can see exactly where they jump out and rank

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is compared to others but the one that's currently highlighted and shown is this one here

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and that one will always have the red letters associated with it right there and also that particular

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school is the one that's reflected in the histogram and again this histogram is showing a

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representation of what's in the data table beneath and you can see the 88.73 there's our composite

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at index score at 30.73 matches, what's in the histogram here, and the average across

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all schools is 64.89, so it gives you an idea of how far you're deviating from the average,

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essentially, for a particular index score and school. So the school composite index scores are there.

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High school composite index scores are also available here. What's interesting is that,

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they point this out. For elementary schools, you would think that high schools would be excluded,

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but if we pull off unfiltered elementary districts, for instance, when we're looking at

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the elementary school index scores, and we turn off, I'm sorry, not elementary districts,

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let's turn off elementary school, and let's turn off mid-June high school, and we're left with

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a list of high schools that actually fall into our ranking for index scores, which is interesting.

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The reason for it is if you look at the grade bands for these schools, 6, 12, 7, 12, 6, 12,

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PK through 12, what it basically means is they have grade levels that are both elementary,

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up to eighth grade, and then they have grade levels in that same building that go 9, 10, 11, and 12.

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So there's actually two actual separate index scores that exist for each of these schools.

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Everybody in this list actually has two. On the Illinois Interactive Report Card website,

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that you won't see the one that represents their elementary ranking.

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You'll only see the one that represents their high school ranking,

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which is an interesting thing.

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So for instance, let's say we're looking at this one at

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Wood Middle High School, right?

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That one has a 68.06, but if we were to, for instance,

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pull up the Illinois Interactive Report card.

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And let me grab that school name again, this one right here.

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And we were to pull that up and look and

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all

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would little high school there it is.

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What we'll see is if we go into the summative designation, we'll see an 89.22.

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But if we go back to the report card, we have a 68.06 when we're looking at it in terms of elementary rankings.

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So they only show the high school index score, the 89.22.

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I haven't been able to find the other one anywhere in here in terms of the elementary ranking for this particular school. I was unable to find that. I don't think they're there.

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So to verify that this is correct, however, if we go into the high school rankings 89.22. So if we go up here and change it to high school,

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And then we find that same school, right, which actually is still highlighted.

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There it is right there, and then I move this up so I can scroll over a little bit.

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There is our 89.22.

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So that composite index score is actually the high school only version of this, and then

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the elementary school version is the other number, which is interesting, and I don't think most

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people are aware of the fact that there's two of them.

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and when schools are ranked one against the other,

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they're actually included depending on which grade levels

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of particular school services.

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So, the last piece I'd like to kind of go over here

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is again, ELA proficiency.

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So oftentimes the question comes,

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and let's just go back to our district again,

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Homer, for instance.

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Homer, where are you?

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Homer, do do do do do, minus not seeing it.

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Oh, because I'm still looking at high schools.

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Let's turn all these back on.

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There we go. And now we'll find Homer and

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if we're now looking at

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Homer schools, we have our let's look at the junior high, that'll be the main highlighted one.

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So you can see our junior high is essentially at 85% for ELA proficiency, which is pretty darn good.

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It's up here near the top of schools in the area. However, you always wonder well.

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How does that really compare, like are we okay, are we doing okay, that's a very difficult

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question to answer.

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And I'm not saying that this is the end all be all answered to the question, but it's

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often times interesting to look at what arguably is the most correlating indicator, which I found

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to be the low income amounts for a particular building.

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So if you click this little disclosure triangle about the low income comparison filter, what

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What you'll see is basically a graph, a scatter plot, of all the data points that are shown

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in the table below, so 3,406 scatter points in this plot right here, along with a line

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of best fit or a rational line that's kind of put across them, and we're looking basically

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a low income across the x-axis, and a percent ELA proficiency or whatever metric we picked

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here on the left across the y-axis.

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And we have a couple of relevant metrics here.

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So we have an r, which is a correlation of the two metrics to each other, of 0.77, which

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is pretty good.

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A 1.0 would be a perfect correlation, and a 0 would be a no-correlation at all.

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And then negative 1.0 would be a perfect correlation, but in the opposite direction instead of decreasing

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like this one, on this graph it would be increasing.

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So a 0.77 is pretty good, and then the r squared, which is the 0.6, kind of gives you an idea

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of how much of the variance between scores

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can be attributed to this particular factor.

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So about 60% of the variance could be attributed

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to this factor.

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So by no means is this the perfect metric,

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but it does seem to be about the closest one

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in terms of trying to find some way to gauge

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where districts should be in comparison

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to other districts on a similar metric, right?

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So that's why this comparison filter was built.

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So this is the explanation.

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and this is a live graph by the way if we were to change things like for instance take off

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high school districts because we're just an elementary district so let's say we were to take off

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all high schools right you'll notice that the plots change now we're only a 2800 and actually

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our correlation you know went up a little bit to 0.786 sorry 0.78 and 0.61 on the R squared so it's

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even a little bit better now if we want to actually use that to kind of see how we rank with our

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a peer group that would be a low-income comparison peer group. If you just click this checkbox here,

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it immediately pulls out all of the districts except those that actually fall into a low-income

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category, above or beneath us, by essentially 14 on top, 14 on the bottom, so 29 total entries.

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We have 29 rows here, so we're trying to be the median in terms of low income,

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and then we're looking to see where we fall in that peer group. So in this particular case, out

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of 29 rows we're kind of falling in eighth and you can see that we just scroll us up a little bit

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that in general you know we're we're we're right up there within five points of essentially the

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highest and it goes down to the 60% here down the lower side. You can also see the representation

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here in the histogram at the top kind of where the average is and how we're on to the side

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to the high side of the average. Again not a perfect correlation but it's a good a good way

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to get an idea of whether you're kind of doing an average,

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what everybody else is doing, or whether it may be a little bit above

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in a particular building, or maybe a little bit below,

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what a similar peer group based on low income would actually be.

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So to sort by low income, you'll see that that puts us right into the middle.

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Again, we're trying to be the median in this list of peers,

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and in this case, we are. And by looking at that, it gives us,

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you know, a good idea kind of how we're doing.

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So in this particular case it's it's above average and then you can get into the question of well is it above average enough

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So those are those are questions you can have after kind of making this initial analysis

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So I'll turn that back off

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But that's the purpose and the use of the low income comparison filter

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It defines you a peer group of low income districts or schools that are similar to the one that you're comparing

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Against and puts that one right in the middle in terms of low income percentage

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makes it the median and then you can see how the actual metric plays out and where

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you fall into the overall hierarchy. So anyway, hopefully this can be useful.

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It was written for Homer but obviously it can be used for any school district

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and if there are any questions my contact information is at the bottom of the

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page here. The code, all of the code in terms of this tool as well as how the

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The actual data files were sourced and then modified to make them usable in this tool is

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all available here in this Google Colab IPython notebook.

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The data is actually accessible here except for the FOIA data that I have to get directly

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from ISB.

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I'm as accessible here in the Illinois Report Card Data website.

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And then my contact information, my phone number and my email address are here.

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And the entire tool is basically copyrighted under Creative Commons license.

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Basically, it can be used pretty much done with whatever you want, just the

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attribution is required, and yeah, that's it. So if you have any questions, please

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contact me about the tool. I'm happy to help. If there is good ideas that are

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brought on that maybe other people want to see, I could incorporate them into

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future versions. And the idea is that I just kind of keep this going into the

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future as long as I can and it allows for you know some healthy discussions hopefully to be had

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in terms of how districts are all performing relative to one another. So thank you for your time.

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Have a great day.