Examining Relationships Between Where Students Start and How Rapidly They Progress: Implications for Constructing Indicators That Help Illuminate the Distribution of Achievement Within Schools

Attending to school mean rates of change and differences in rates of change for various demographic groups is of central importance in monitoring school performance. In this paper, we argue for the need to expand this focus by also considering the relationship between where students in a school start (i.e., their initial status) and how rapidly they progress. In particular, we explore several ways in which attending to initial status in analyses of student progress can help draw attention to possible concerns regarding the distribution of achievement within schools, and, it is hoped, help stimulate discussion among teachers and administrators at given school sites regarding these concerns. To illustrate key points, we fit a series of growth models to the time series data for students in several schools in the Longitudinal Study of American Youth (LSAY) sample.