schoolsearch: Understanding the chart

Understanding the chart

By Times staff

You don't need a postgraduate degree to read the accompanying chart, but some basic guidelines should help you maximize the information it offers.

Schools are arranged by attendance area and grade level (elementary, middle and high school). Fundamental, magnet and high schools draw from throughout the county. Within each attendance area, schools are grouped by the letter grades the state gave them. And within each of those subgroups, the schools are listed alphabetically. Although the school grades are listed for each of the last four years, the rules have changed annually, which makes year-to-year comparisons imprecise at best.

Please note: The numbers that contribute to the letter grades the schools receive are not raw data, which may be more indicative of how the school fared on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. (For that information, please consult the FCAT Web site, http://www.firn.edu/doe/sas/fcat/fcatscor.htm. If you don't have access to a computer, they are available at no charge in all public libraries.)

In the broadest terms, under the state's grading system, a letter grade of:

"A" means a school scored 410 points or more.

"B" means a school scored 380 points or more.

"C" means a school scored 320 points or more.

"D" means a school scored 280 points or more.

"F" means a school scored fewer than 280 points.

(There are other things that factor into the grade, but the key number is a school's total points.)

Those total points come from adding up the first six columns of numbers in the chart. Not all students' FCAT scores count toward a school's grade. In general, students' scores counted if they had been at the same school in October and February and if they were in the standard curriculum. (See accompanying story to understand how the state defines "meeting high standards" and "making learning gains.")

Also, for more detail about how the raw data are interpreted, please see accompanying story.