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Some Answers About the Alabama Accountability Act from New Reports Mandated by Law

The first full round of new reports required as a results of changes made to the Alabama Accountability Act (AAA) in 2015 are in. Those reports answer a lot of questions, but some questions remain unanswered about the effectiveness of the program. For basic information on the...
Posted On Oct 02 2016
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What the Annual Alabama “School Incident Report” Shows

Each summer, the Alabama State Department of Education (ALSDE) releases the annual “Student Incident Report” (SIR) by school. It is a compilation of numbers of students involved in violations at school, reported online via the SIR system. Any and ever...
Posted On Sep 21 2016
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Wanna Know More About Who Gets Paddled in Alabama’s Schools?

Alabama Media Group and Alabama School Connection collaborated on this story, published Monday morning, about paddling in Alabama’s schools. We learned this morning that nearly 19,000 students were paddled in Alabama’s schools during the 2013-2014 school year...
Posted On Sep 12 2016
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More Than 90,000 Alabama Students and Nearly 15,000 Teachers Missed a LOT of School – Look Up Your School

One of eight students in Alabama’s public schools missed fifteen or more days of school in the 2013-2014 school year. (Out of 180 school days in each academic year.) That sounds bad, but consider this: nearly one in THREE Alabama school teachers missed more than TEN days...
Posted On Sep 01 2016
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How Alabama Compares in the Latest ACT College and Career Readiness Report

Numbers are hard sometimes. Particularly in education, particularly in Alabama. So many easy (and often unflattering) comparisons to make. A quick scan of where Alabama’s graduates stand in ACT’s newly-released College and Career Readiness Report for 2016 might get...
Posted On Aug 24 2016
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The Numbers Are In: SGOs Are Paying More than the State to Educate Students

On average, scholarship-granting organizations (SGOs) paid $5,742.09 per students to attend one of the 155 schools participating in the program during the 2015-2016 school year according to reports filed by the SGOs with the Alabama Department of Revenue (ADOR). By contrast, the...
Posted On Aug 02 2016
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When Do Schools Open for the 2016-2017 School Year?

Yep. It’s that time again. The map below shows you when school opens in each of Alabama’s school districts…except Pelham City and Pike Road City, which aren’t yet reflected in the map (hopefully they’ll be in the August Census bureau update). The...
Posted On Jul 02 2016
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Advanced Placement Courses in Alabama – See the Data Here

Alabama School Connection and BirminghamWatch recently collaborated to publish a package of articles about how Advanced Placement (AP) course-taking is on the rise, why that rise has occurred, and what impact that may have for students in Alabama. We pulled together a lot of data...
Posted On Jun 26 2016
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Finding the Data

Data forms the foundation for a lot of what I write about here on the Alabama School Connection news site. I’ve been pondering how to get all the data in one place, and I realized that a lot of it is already in one place: on my profile at the Tableau Public site. So here it...
Posted On Jun 18 2016
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Chronic Absenteeism a Serious Problem at Many Alabama Schools

Nearly 93,000 students in Alabama’s public schools missed 15 or more days of school during the 2013-2014 school year according to recently released data from the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE). While Alabama’s overall chronic absenteeism rate of 12.5% is lower...
Posted On Jun 08 2016
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Measuring College Readiness: Remediation Rates

“Career- and college-readiness” is the education term du jour. It has become the mission of public schools, and measures of student readiness are used to judge whether schools are being successful in that mission. But what does “career- an...
Posted On Mar 22 2016
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Alabama’s PLAN 2020 – The Actual Document

We hear a lot about PLAN 2020, the Alabama State Board of Education’s strategic plan for education. Here’s a look at it. Measures were updated on January 26, 2016. Alabama PLAN 2020 – updated 1/26/2016
Posted On Mar 07 2016
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The House Committee’s Version of the Education Budget

The Alabama House Ways and Means Education committee gave a favorable report to its version of the Education Trust Fund budget yesterday. It approved a package of bills, including the actual budget, a pay raise bill, and additional ordinary appropriation bills. Lots of news folks...
Posted On Mar 03 2016
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State Board of Education Primary Election Results

Two current state board of education members won their primaries, and two are headed to runoffs. Long-time board members Stephanie Bell (R-District 3) and Ella Bell (D-District 5) defeated their primary challengers. Stephanie Bell, first elected to the board in 1995, faces a...
Posted On Mar 03 2016
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MAP: The “Failing” Public Schools & the AAA-Participating Schools

According to Alabama’s lawmakers, they created the Alabama Accountability Act (AAA) to allow parents to choose better educational options for their children. Getting a look at what choices there are, looking at where the non-public schools participating in the AAA’s...
Posted On Feb 25 2016
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Alabama’s High School Graduation Rates

Alabama’s meteoric increase in high school graduation rates, from 72% in 2011 to 89% in 2015, has some folks questioning those numbers. Governor Robert Bentley praised that increase in Alabama’s public school graduation rates in his State of the State speech Tuesday...
Posted On Feb 04 2016
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Graduation Rates for the Class of 2015 – Disaggregated

Every group of students graduated in higher percentages than the class of 2014, according to numbers released by the Alabama State Department of Education this morning. Here’s the spreadsheet from the ALSDE’s web site. The spreadsheet breaks down rates by subgroup and...
Posted On Jan 26 2016
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Alabama Superintendent Salaries for FY16

Found the FY16 Superintendent Salaries on the Alabama State Department of Education web site today. These salaries are published on a yearly basis. Superintendent salaries are paid with local tax money. Here are a few different ways to look at these salaries. Hover over a...
Posted On Jan 11 2016
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How Come Other States’ Students with Disabilities Do So Much Better on the NAEP?

Having heard lots of excuses justifications reasons for why students with disabilities score poorly on the Alabama-mandated ACT Aspire, it’s time now to look at the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to see how Alabama’s students with disabilities...
Posted On Jan 10 2016
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What’s Up with Alabama’s NAEP Scores?

Why does Alabama always land at the bottom of the list for National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results? Scores and ranking for 2015 were released late last year, and once again, Alabama found itself near the bottom in the four areas in which the NAEP produces a...
Posted On Jan 08 2016
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Seriously? The State of Special Education in Alabama

With all of the energy being put into changing special education regulations to further restrict when and how parents can file complaints about their children’s special education in Alabama’s schools, one might think that the rest of special education is going along...
Posted On Jan 04 2016
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ACT Aspire Results by School. On a Map.

[This article was updated on September 29, 2016, to include Per Pupil Expenditures for FY15 on the map.] A couple of weeks ago, we shared two years of district-level ACT Aspire results. On a map. This time, we’re diving into two years of school-level results. On a map....
Posted On Nov 25 2015
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Alabama’s ACT Aspire Results. On a Map. Two Years’ Worth.

The Alabama State Department of Education released the results of the 2015 ACT Aspire results on Thursday. What follows are a series of maps. And tables. Read the directions. Click the buttons. To find your individual school’s results, click here. For the results that...
Posted On Nov 13 2015
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Student Data for Alabama’s School Districts for the Past 11 Years. On a Map.

Collecting information, a.k.a. data points, and sharing in a way that regular folks can not only understand, but also use the information, is central to the Alabama School Connection’s mission. While the Alabama State Department of Education does provide a lot of useful...
Posted On Nov 06 2015
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The Private Schools That Receive Tax-Credit Scholarship Funds

Sometimes it takes seeing things on a map to get a clearer picture. So here’s a map showing where Alabama’s 62 56 “failing” public schools are and where the 137 private schools receiving scholarships under the Alabama Accountability Act (AAA) are.* Hover...
Posted On Oct 27 2015
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