Ohio Public School Mapping - OGT Mapping

The Ohio Graduation Test (OGT) is a proficiency test given to all students in their sophomore year of high school throughout the state of Ohio.  The OGT replaced the Ohio Proficiency Test in reaction to the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001.  The OGT was first administered in March of 2005 to high school sophomores graduating in 2007. The state requires that all high school students pass all five subjects of the OGT test in order to graduate from high school.  Any student who fails a portion of a test is given several chances between the release of the initial scores when taking it for the first time and graduating from high school.  The future of the OGT is currently in doubt as the previous Strickland administration looked into replacing the OGT with the ACT and other reforms (Ramírez 2009).  The implementation of the ACT would not only mean students could take the test to graduate from high school, but also to use the scores to apply for college and receive scholarships.

Students are tested in five subjects (reading, math, writing, science, and social studies). The time series maps below show the percentage of students who passed a subject of the OGT from    2009 – 2011 in their respected school districts throughout Ohio.  Scores from private schools and charter schools are omitted from the maps as their location and range educating students are not fixed to the map compared to public schools.  The color ramp corresponds to the grading scale given in all schools on an A – F scale.  For example if a school district is shaded red on a certain subject in a certain year for the OGT, the school district has less than 60% of their students passing that subject.  If it was shaded dark green on a certain subject in a certain year for the OGT, the school district has more than 90% of their students passing that subject.

The time series maps above show varying results on each subject area of the test. In general, students tend to score best on the Writing portion of the test and worst on Science. In fact, some schools had a proficiency rate as low as 25%, meaning three of every 4 students in the district did not pass the science portion of the OGT. The chart below shows a graphical representation of the 2010-2011 OGT results. The vertical axis represents the percentage of students in each district that passed a particular section of the OGT. The boxes represent the middle fifty percent of districts and each line represents the full range of districts. For example, the graph shows that for Social Studies, the highest scoring district had 100% of its students pass that section, while the lowest scoring district had only about 39% of its students pass. The middle fifty percent of districts saw a range from about 92% to 79% of their students pass the Social Studies section.

As might be expected, the highest performing school districts tended to be in suburban areas, while the lowest scoring schools were those in low-income and urban districts like Cleveland, Dayton, Youngstown, and Columbus, to name a few. Rural districts in Southeastern Ohio also scored relatively low compared to rural districts in other parts of the state.

In the coming weeks, we will post several blogs related to education in Ohio. Over the course of those blogs, we will begin to look at some of the factors that may contribute to district performance, like demographics, teacher salary, student-to-teacher ratio, and teacher experience.

Sources

Ramírez, Eddy. “Ohio Considers Making ACT Test Graduation Requirement” U.S. News. February 3, 2009. Retrieved April 6, 2012. <http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/on-education/2009/02/03/ohio-considers-making-act-test-graduation-requirement>.