Measuring and reporting capacity in Idaho public schools

Pursuant to Senate Bill No. 1125, this serves as OSBE's report on school district capacity and transfer data.

33-1409. Paragraph (4): By September 1 each year, the state board of education shall collect, analyze, and publish to its website the capacity and transfer data from each school district from the previous year. The report shall include the number of participants, the number of denied applications, and other relevant information. The state board of education shall also report this information to the legislature no later than February 1 of each year.

OSBE's Education Data and Information Technology Team added a data collection on open enrollment to the Idaho System for Educational Excellence (ISEE) data system. There were nine items collected:

I define three different measures from this underlying data and include those measures in district level maps for both General Education and Gifted and Talented programs and in school level maps for General Education. These measures are only calculated for the final data submission of the school year (April 1).

Measure 1: Transfer Capacity

Transfer Capacity is the total number of seats that are available to be filled using the open enrollment process. It is calculated from the raw data as:

Transfer Capacity = Space available + Applications accepted/approved

Note: This definition assumes that space available was reported after taking into account the seats that were filled by the open enrollment process.

It is also reported as a share of maximum enrollment allowed to understand what share of total capacity is available for transfers. Understanding transfer capacity allows stakeholders to understand the degree to which students are actually able to utilize the open enrollment process.

Measure 2: Transfer Demand

Transfer Demand = Applications Received / Transfer Capacity

Transfer demand allows stakeholders to understand how many students applied for the available transfer seats. This could be greater than 1.0 if there were more applications that transfer capacity available.

Measure 3: Unmet Transfer Demand

Unmet transfer demand = Applications Denied / Applications Received

In some cases, there will be applications that are denied. Some denials may be due to capacity constraints. These capacity constraints could be a matter of timing. For instance, a school may not have any capacity available and deny applications but then have students leave. The data would appear as if the schools denied applications when there was transfer capacity. There could be other reasons for denying an application. This measure does not consider why applications were denied. It simply reports what share of applications received were denied.

These three measures are only reported at the school and district level. The measures are not reported for Gifted and Talented programs at the school level due to small numbers. Likewise, while transfer capacity is reported for each grade, the measures on transfer demand and unmet transfer demand are not reported at the grade level because of small numbers. Instead, the underlying data on applications received and applications denied is reported.

All data collected is available in the data download so stakeholders could calculate the measures at levels not reported here.

In the future, I will analyze the measures to determine whether or not there are systematic differences in the measures across schools according to locale (city, suburb, near a city or suburb, far away from a city or suburb) or ISAT performance. The goal this first year is to understand the usefulness of these measures and to gather input on what sorts of factors should be included in the analysis.