Challenge Index

Seems like everyone in the blogosphere is always arguing about the student populations of charter schools - whether they have easier to teach or harder to teach populations than their sending districts. Problem is that there seems to be no consistency in these arguments. I figure we all need one number that combines that reflects the "hard to teach"populations. Maybe I've missed something, but I haven't seen one out there. So I thought I'd come up with something that I'm currently calling "Challenge Index."

The big arguments seems to be about 3 groups: low-income, special education and English language learners, so I thought I'd include those in the index. Here's the system, for what it's worth:

% Limited English Proficient + % Free and Reduced Lunch + % Special Education = CI

The benefit of the system is that it's simple. The flaws...well, there are a lot. But since this is the data is easy to get to on the DOE website, I'm going with it.

First post to include CI data to come soon.