Mt. Lebanon School District Historical Performance
This analysis is a work in progress and may not yet live up to our standards. Nevertheless…
If anything on this page is hard to understand, it’s our fault! Please, tell us, so we can fix it.
Our goal is to produce research that is clear, correct, and trustworthy. If you find anything below hard to follow or hard to believe, please let us know. Send email to standards@mlao.org and tell us what you think. We appreciate candor, so don’t be afraid to tell us what you really think. Thanks!
Historical math and reading performance
This analysis tries to show how the Mt. Lebanon school district’s total performance has changed over time, compared to other top-performing school districts within Pennsylvania. It focuses on 11th-grade results, which we use as indicators of the school district’s total, multi-year effort to provide an education, and it focuses on advanced achievement, which we use over mere proficiency to better assess how graduating students are prepared to meet the requirements of university-level study. Our primary source is standardized test scores for math and reading from 2002–2010.
The following graph shows how Mt. Lebanon ranks on 11th-grade advanced math and advanced reading, compared to other Pennsylvania school districts. The graph focuses on the top 5% of school districts in the commonwealth. For comparison with other top-performing local school districts, Upper St. Clair and North Allegheny are also shown.
MTLSD Advanced Math and Reading Historical Rankings
National Merit Scholarships
As another way to measure the school district’s performance at the highest levels of academic achievement, we looked to the National Merit Scholarship. Only the top few percent of students who take the qualifying test for the scholarship receive special recognition.
Our analysis considered two kinds of recognition: commendation, for which about 3% of tested students qualify, and semifinalist status, for which about 1% qualify. For both, Mt. Lebanon’s performance has declined:
MTLSD National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test historical performance
Commentary
Overall, Mt. Lebanon continues to be among the top-performing school districts in the commonwealth. The trend, however, appears to be one of slow decline.
In both math and reading at the advanced level, Mt. Lebanon’s average rank for the most-recent three years is below that of the prior three-year period. When performance indicators are down for three years in a row, it’s less likely to be the result of measurement jitter, suggesting a real decline.
Similarly, there is an obvious downward trend in the portion of students who receive special recognition in the qualifying tests for the National Merit Scholarship.
The results for the most-recent year, however, are slightly improved, providing some reason to hope that the decline is being countered. But it’s too early to tell whether the improvement is indicative of a trend. Further, it will take several years of improvement to recover from the decline.
Notes on the analysis
The measurement scheme used in this analysis was designed to meet the following goals:
- to measure the school district’s final output, that is, the result of its multi-year educational effort
- to be robust against external factors that would affect school districts in general, and not just Mt. Lebanon
- to be sensitive to changes in performance at the highest levels of academic achievement, where we would expect any decline in overall performance to be detectable at the earliest
To meet these goals, we used 11th-grade PSSA data, which are available for many years and designed, in part, for school assessment. For sensitivity to changes in advanced achievement, we focused only on PSSA “advanced” performance, not “proficient or better,” as commonly reported. For robustness against systematic changes, we converted the PSSA results into relative rankings.
To supplement PSSA results, we turned to National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test results because they, too, are a measure of performance at the highest levels of academic achievement.
Sources
The Pennsylvania Department of Education, PSSA results, years 2002–2010.
Student Outcomes Report 2010, Mt. Lebanon School District, p. 42.
