DUHS a national ‘bronze medalist’

Published 12:26 am Tuesday, December 18, 2007

By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Kathleen N. Straus, president of the State Board of Education, and Mike Flanagan, Michigan superintendent of public instruction, wrote to congratulate Union High School's selection as a 2008 "Bronze Medalist" by the national magazine U.S. News and World Report.
"It is encouraging to see the dedication and devotion that your school has demonstrated in student achievement, class offerings and college-readiness," Flanagan and Straus wrote in a Dec. 11 letter to Superintendent Peg Stowers.
"The state of Michigan is richer for your efforts and educators like yourself are the cornerstone to a brighter future for our state.
"On behalf of the State Board and Department, we would like to congratulate you, your staff and students on this tremendous accomplishment. Your school is a model for others to follow. Keep up your great efforts and help motivate others to join you."
Considering that DUHS had been denigrated in October as one of 78 Michigan high school "dropout factories" along with Benton Harbor, Brandywine, Covert, Coloma, Hartford and South Haven in an analysis of U.S. Department of Education enrollment data conducted by Johns Hopkins for The Associated Press, it was like being reclassified by Santa Claus on Christmas Eve from naughty to nice.
Dowagiac is the only public school in Cass or Berrien counties to be so recognized. Paw Paw made it in Van Buren County and Parchment in Kalamazoo County.
"This is really exciting," Stowers told the school board at Dowagiac Middle School cafeteria. "Once again, it goes without saying that there are many, many fine things that go on in Dowagiac public schools. All of our efforts, diligence and hard work go into making sure that our students are achieving. Paul, congratulations," she recognized Principal Hartsig and Assistant Principal Kelly Millin.
Dowagiac's bronze medal is much more in line with its earlier accolade when Standard &Poor's named it one of 43 districts – 8.4 percent of Michigan's 512 districts – that outperformed demographically similar school districts in reading and math proficiency for 2003-2004 and for 2004-2005.
U.S. News and World Report analyzed 18,790 public high schools in 40 states using data from the 2005-2006 school year. This is the total number of public high schools in each state that had grade 12 enrollment and sufficient data to analyze for the 2005-2006 school year.
A three-step process determined the best high schools. The first two steps insured that the schools serve all of their students well using state proficiency standards as the measuring benchmarks. For those schools which cleared the first two steps, a third step assessed the degree to which schools prepared students for college-level work.
On college readiness, the first step determined whether each school's students were performing better than statistically expected for the average student in their state. The magazine started by looking at reading and math test results for all students on each state's high school test, then factored in the percentage of economically disadvantaged students (who tend to score lower) enrolled at the school to determine which schools were performing better than their statistical expectations.
For those schools that made it past that first step, the second step determined whether the school's least-advantaged students (black, Hispanic and low-income) performed better than average for similar students in the state. U.S. News and World Report compared each school's math and reading proficiency rates for disadvantaged students with the statewide results for these disadvantaged student groups, then selected schools that were performing better than this state average.
Schools that made it through the first two steps became eligible to be judged nationally on the final step: college-readiness performance, using Advanced Placement data as the benchmark for success.
AP is a College Board program that offers college-level courses at high schools across the country.
This third step gauged which schools produced the best college-level achievement for the highest percentage of their students. This was done by computing a "college readiness index" based on the weighted average of the AP participation rate (the number of 12th-grade students who took at least one AP test before or during their senior year, divided by the number of 12th graders at the school).
For the college readiness index, the quality-adjusted AP participation rates were weighted 75 percent in the calculation. Twenty-five percent of the weight fell on the simple AP participation rate.
Only schools which had values greater than 20 in their college readiness index scored high enough to meet this criterion for gold medal selection.
The minimum of 20 was used since it represents what it would take to have a "critical mass" of students gaining access to college-level coursework.