Prince William County Schools warned teachers Monday that a recent court ruling would grant the news media access to Student Growth Percentile (SGP) reports bearing teacher names and license information.
"The court ruled that the SGP reports provided to school divisions by are not exempt from the Commonwealth's Freedom of information Act," Associate Superintendent for Communications and Technology Services Keith Imon said in a division-wide email to teachers. "VDOE will comply with the court's order by providing reports scrubbed of identifying student information, but with teacher information intact,"
The lawsuit was initiated by two citizens outside of Prince William County.
"SGPs provide a measure that quantifies the progress each student made on Standards of Learning (SOL) tests compared to other Virginia students statewide who had similar prior achievement histories on previous SOL tests," the VDOE said. "SGPs provide an understanding of how much progress students made based on where they started—regardless of whether they started as low, moderate, or high achieving students." VDOE considers that a high growth percentile indicates effective instruction and recommends SGPs as one measure of progress in teacher performance evaluations. "A student growth percentile complements a student’s SOL scaled score and gives his or her teacher, parents and principal a more complete picture of achievement and progress," they said. According to Imon, the VDOE is considering other methods to evaluate teacher performance, since the SGP data is difficult to interpret."Meanwhile, school divisions will work with VDOE to help explain and avoid misinterpretation of information that goes public. However, neither the state agency nor individual school divisions (including PWCS) are able to prevent the release," he said.
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