Re: Melrose has higher percentage of students in Advanced and Proficient than Mystic Valley
"don't forget that this blog was brought into Melrose by charter school parents for the sole purpose of comparing the schools and maligning the City of Melrose."
Re: Mystic Valley Consistently Improves Students More than Melrose
Professional Analyst
I make my living performing statistical analyses. There are others who may be able to do what I do for a living, but there is at least one person making deliberately misleading comparisons between Mystic Valley and Melrose schools with the shameless intent of making Melrose look better regardless of reality.
What's obvious is that Mystic Valley students start their schooling not knowing as much as Melrose students... This is likely due to a different demographic and students having less support from home. Mystic Valley students, on average, come to the school with fewer advantages than Melrose students.
Interesting. So I looked at this year's MCAS data to see if that was true. Based on the 10th grade results, this is the percent of low income students in the 10th grade to the general class. It looks like Mystic Valley actually has the least amount of low income students in high school compared to all sending schools. So the statement that "MV students, on average, come to the school with fewer advantages than Melrose students" is not supported by the data. In fact, of all of the sending districts, they had the least amount of low income students.
10th grade MCAS
Mystic Valley - 10 Low Income out of 105 total (<10%)
Melrose - 41 Low Income out of 223 total (18%)
Malden - 257 Low Income out of 411 total (63%)
Stoneham - 42 Low Income out of 151 total (28%)
Wakefield - 35 Low Income out of 250 total (14%)
Medford - 89 Low Income out of 253 total (35%)
Everett - 322 Low Income out of 446 total (72%)
Similarly, Mystic Valley has the fewest amount of high need students (17% of its 10th grade students are high needs versus 30%, 68%, 42%, 20% and 78% for the sending districts).
I thought the goals of the charter schools were to serve those children with fewer advantages. Using any meaningful data, it doesn't look like Mystic Valley is meeting this goal.