Lincoln Elementary, whose students have struggled in some measures of academic performance, suddenly has something to celebrate: A new analysis says Lincoln students' reading and math skills are improving faster than anywhere else in the Madison School District.

The report by the district and the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at UW-Madison is the first to analyze Madison students' achievement levels by drawing upon a so-called "value-added growth" system that looks at the amount of students' improvement over time.

Rather than just ranking the school by the scores on the test, the value-added system looks at how the school's scores have improved compared to the other schools in the district.

It also takes into account the demographic characteristics of students in an attempt to determine the impact of schooling upon students' performance. Among the characteristics included in the study are income, race, English language ability and parents' education levels.

The analysis of data from 27 elementary schools and 11 middle schools is based on scores from the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination (WKCE), a state test required by the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Madison is the second Wisconsin district, after Milwaukee, to make a major push toward value-added systems, which are gaining support nationally as an improved way of measuring school performance.

Advocates say it's better to track specific students' gains over time than the current system, which holds schools accountable for how many students at a single point in time are rated proficient on state tests.

"This is very important," Madison schools Superintendent Daniel Nerad said. "We think it's a particularly fair way ... because it's looking at the growth in that school and ascertaining the influence that the school is having on that outcome."

The findings will be used to pinpoint effective teaching methods and classroom design strategies, officials said. But they won't be used to evaluate teachers: That's forbidden by state law.

The district paid about $60,000 for the study.

The report, which will be discussed tonight by the School Board, says students at Lincoln, Muir, Randall and Shorewood elementary schools posted the greatest gains in a comparison of 2005, 2006 and 2007 state reading test scores. The schools with the smallest reading gains were Allis, Emerson and Kennedy.

On math tests, the largest improvements were shown at Lincoln, Shorewood and Elvehjem. The smallest growth occurred at Van Hise, Allis and Falk.

Researchers noted that the differences between the Madison schools' performances were relatively small compared to what they've seen in other districts around the nation. In fact, the differences between the middle schools were a statistical dead heat — no school fared significantly better or worse than the others.

"It's not something we've seen in other districts ever before," said Rob Meyer, director of the Value-Added Research Center at UW-Madison, which has conducted similar studies in Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis and Dallas.

He said the uniform scores suggest that Madison does a good job of maintaining high standards throughout the district.

Results of the study should be interpreted carefully, researchers said, because the results are subject to a margin of error, similar to the dynamics seen in analysis of political poll results. The trends will become clearer in future years as additional data accumulate.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction is allowing districts to explore value-added systems under a U.S. Department of Education grant program. Under such a system, some schools generally well regarded because of overall high test scores may be listed as places in which students demonstrate little improvement, while schools generally thought of as places of low achievement may be listed as demonstrating high levels of improvement.

That's exactly what happens in the new Madison report, which also uses statistical techniques to avoid favoring schools whose students are starting out with low test scores.

Lincoln Elementary is ranked at the top in the report, although in 2007 its WKCE reading test scores ranked 25th and its math scores ranked 17th among the 27 Madison schools. Earlier this year, Lincoln was among two Madison elementary schools failing to attain adequate yearly progress as required by No Child Left Behind, because the scores of its English language learners came in too low.

"The value-added data is really a nice boost for our staff right now because we keep getting hammered" by other measures of performance, Lincoln Principal Deborah Hoffman said, praising the method as "a more complex way to look at a complex issue."

Seven in 10 Lincoln students are low-income — the third-highest proportion in the district.

Hoffman speculated that the school's success in the new ranking could be attributed to such factors as a strong underlying education provided at Midvale, Lincoln's paired school, which students attend through second grade; a long-standing focus on staff training; hard work by parents; and partnerships with the UW-Madison School of Education.

In addition to quantifying the impact of schooling, the report also provides data on the effects of demographic factors upon students' improvement rates. The data shed light on the district's achievement gaps.

Factors having the largest negative influence include having a learning disability or other disability, being black, being an English language learner and being in a low-income family.

Factors attributed with the largest positive influence include having parents who are college graduates and having parents with a graduate degree.

"That points to other issues that need to be explored," said Kurt Kiefer, the district's research director, who prepared the study with Meyer, Tim Potter, a district research analyst; and Michael Christian, chief scientist at the UW-Madison research center.

"We certainly haven't figured it all out yet, but we're not going to bury our head in the sand. We've got to learn from this."

If you go

The School Board will discuss the report on "value-added growth" in a meeting at 6 tonight at the district's headquarters, 545 W. Dayton St.