Is Mean NCE Gain the same as “school effect”?
No. The mean NCE gain represents the extent to which students in a school or district are growing relative to the average student in the baseline year (NCE gain of “0”=average gain). This is analogous, but not the same as the school effect, which is used in the Project SOAR value-added approach. The school effect represents the extent to which students did better than the average student in the Project SOAR pool.
