ELA proficiency
The share of students in a school district scoring at or above their state's proficiency standard on the state reading and language arts assessment.
The share of assessed students in a school district who scored at or above their state's proficiency standard on the state reading and language arts assessment. ELA is the Department's abbreviation for English language arts, the subject area the assessment covers.
The Department of Education describes these data as "the percent of students proficient or above on the state assessment, with proficient or above defined as the number of students achieving at the proficient or advanced levels, as defined by the state". The denominator is "the total number of test takers who received a valid score", and the numerator "the number of students assigned to performance levels designated by the state to be at or above grade-level proficiency" (EDFacts assessment file documentation).
Students are assessed annually in grades three through eight and at least once in high school. The figure shown here covers all tested grades combined, for all students rather than any subgroup.
Metrics in this family#
ELA proficiency
levelThe district's most recent reported percent proficient in reading and language arts, from school year 2021-22. No trend accompanies it: the collection loaded here holds a single school year, so there is no earlier point to compare against.
Note that this is a later school year than the mathematics figure, which covers 2020-21. The two are separate collections with separate release timetables, and reading them as a matched pair for one year would be wrong.
Considerations#
The proficiency standard is set by each state, and the tests differ. The Department states that "student achievement data are defined differently in each state, and, therefore, should not be compared across states" (ED Data Express). Comparisons within a state are the meaningful ones.
School year 2021-22 was the first full assessment year after the most severe pandemic disruption, and testing conditions across districts had not fully returned to their prior pattern.
Where a district's tested population is small, the Department publishes a range instead of an exact percentage, or suppresses the value entirely, to protect student privacy. Of the 17,389 districts in this release, about seven in ten carry an exact percentage; most of the rest carry a range or a bound, and the figure shown for those districts is our own estimate inside the published range. Suppressed districts show nothing.
This is a district-level figure displayed on a census tract. It describes the district covering that tract, not the tract, and not any individual school within the district. It covers public schools only.
References#
- 1EDFacts assessment file documentationhttps://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/about/inits/ed/edfacts/data-files/assessments-sy12-13-public-file-documentation-v2-1.doc
- 2ED Data Expresshttps://eddataexpress.ed.gov/about