One of the main unknowns of Puerto Rico’s public education system is why some school units perform substantially better than others, even if they share a similar socioeconomic profile.
Over the years, ABRE has struggled to get accurate and normalized data on school units in Puerto Rico. Given such constraints, ABRE has managed to use the data from standardized tests to try to understand the performance of Puerto Rico’s public schools. In March 2018, ABRE launched ABRE Tu Escuela (abretuescuela.org), Puerto Rico’s first citizen-driven initiative that provides a digital tool for evaluating the performance of individual public schools throughout the island. It includes detailed performance reports for over 1,200 schools, comparisons between these schools, school closure data and downloadable reports.
During 2019, ABRE decided to further its research towards discovering the underlying reasons for the discrepancies found in school performance among geographically proximate schools with similar enrollment and comparable poverty levels. This resulted in the research proposal titled Education Gap Analysis: A Case Study Approach. One of the main questions to be answered was: why do schools with similar characteristics and within close proximity to each other differ so much in their academic proficiency? Using proficiency data from Abretuescuela.org, ABRE selected 14 schools that were to be analyzed in the proposed research. The sample was categorized in 7 pairs, each comprising one High Proficiency School (HPS) and one Low Proficiency School (LPS).
Since there was limited data available from the 14 selected schools and due to the exploratory nature of this research, ABRE designed 4 surveys to draw up a profile of the schools, principals, teachers, and parents. The profiles were designed for gathering general descriptive information about the schools and to assess what could be impacting the schools’ performance in the META-PR tests scores.
