This table compares Colquitt County schools as far as their school climate star rankings, on a scale from 0 to 5 stars with 5 being the best.

MOULTRIE, Ga. — One might say Marnie Kirkland’s job is to turn numbers into actions.

Kirkland, assistant superintendent for curriculum for the Colquitt County School System, recently got a new batch of numbers to put to work: the 2016-2017 College Career Ready Performance Index — a ranking that might be called a “report card for schools.”

In Kirkland’s own words, it’s “a mixed bag,” but she sees a lot of positive results in these numbers because she knows where local schools started, and she knows about the plans each school and the district overall have to improve.

Approximately half of the system’s schools received higher grades than last year — some of them dramatically higher. Others declined, and some of those changes were equally dramatic. See the attached table for a year-by-year breakdown or visit http://www.gadoe.org/CCRPI/Pages/default.aspx for more details.

Three factors add up to the CCRPI: students’ achievement, their progress relative to similar students across the state, and “the gap,” which is the performance of specific subgroups, like racial minorities or students with disabilities, relative to average students.

Kirkland said it’s easier to affect progress and the gap than achievement overall, but because all are tied to the same test scores, changes can have an overwhelming effect.

“The ones that went up were rewarded three times, and those that went down were slammed three times,” she said.

The exact equations to calculate CCRPI are complex, and they’re made more complicated by the fact that details change every year.

For example: The test has traditionally included sections on English/language arts, mathematics, science and social studies, but for the first time this May, third and fourth graders didn’t have to take the science and social studies parts. Elementary schools that traditionally did well in those areas may have seen their scores decline while those that traditionally haven’t done as well in those subjects may have gotten a boost.

Because of such rules changes, it’s slightly inaccurate to compare CCRPI scores from one year to another, but because school administrators know the details that are changed from one year to the next, they can make allowances as they plan for improvement.

Some programs for improvement are already in place, Kirkland said:

• A literacy grant five years ago purchased books for elementary school students. It was the first time that every teacher in the same grade throughout the system was working from the same reading textbook at the same time, Kirkland said. That makes it much easier to train teachers on how to use the book to teach the state standards. She said she plans to apply for a similar grant that’s becoming available soon to expand that success.

• The school system implemented a district improvement initiative in January to focus on literacy and writing, student conversation and engagement, and co-teaching.

• The system has made changes to the teachers’ professional learning model to emphasize improvement at each school. The new model requires collaboration among teachers and helps to encourage support for one another.

• Over the last two years, the system has added interventionists at many schools as the data dictated what kind of help the students at those schools needed — help with reading, or support while learning English, or whatever. Some schools are still determining what their intervention needs are, Kirkland said, and personnel will be added as those needs become apparent.

Kirkland said those last two — teacher collaboration and interventionists — played a big role in the improvements at the schools whose CCRPI scores went up. It’s a reflection that those schools are farther along in implementing them than schools whose scores didn’t improve, she said.

• All the schools now participate in Positive Behavioral Intervention Strategies; the system is in the last year of a multi-year rollout of the program. A core concept of PBIS is a short list of school rules, developed by staff in the school with input from students, that every teacher knows and can enforce. Kirkland offered an example: Prior to PBIS, one teacher might have had a rule against walking with hands in the pockets. If he saw another teacher’s student doing that, the teacher might have refrained from correcting that student because he didn’t know if that was against the rules in the other teacher’s classroom. Now, if that’s a school rule, any teacher can enforce it, and if it’s not, then it isn’t an issue. “That way we’re all on the same page as far as discipline,” Kirkland said.

• A new literacy program was implemented with kindergartners four years ago. Those students took the test for the first time as third graders this past May, Kirkland said. “They did better than any third graders have before in literacy,” she said.

The test scores and other data that comprise the CCRPI are available to school administrators, right down to the student level. A teacher can see how a student did on the tests each year that he was in the system. Kirkland said that’s one more piece of information that helps them address that student’s individual needs.