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Dr. David Hopson |
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September 18 , 2006 I’m sure that many of you have seen the statistics from the Department of Education regarding the increasing number of schools statewide that failed to make ‘Adequate Yearly Progress’ (AYP) this year. As I mentioned in last week’s column, we have a number of schools in this category: Blandford, Chester, Littleville, and Russell for failure to make the state’s cutoff score in English Language Arts, and the Middle School for both English Language Arts and Mathematics. R.H. Conwell’s student population is too small to count and the High School made the state’s cutoff score in both Mathematics and English Language Arts; as such, both of these schools have ‘No Status’. I’d prefer a different name for the High School’s status because these students scored well enough to qualify at next year’s even higher cutoff score—perhaps the state should add a ‘Successful’ category. Essentially the state has three sets of sanctions for failing to make the AYP—Improvement, Corrective Action, and Restructuring. Each of these sanctions requires additional time, effort, and money from the district, yet the state does not provide additional funding for these actions. Schools in improvement status have to offer in-district school choice, increase spending in professional development, and devise an improvement plan. We are meeting these state requirements: school choice is only an option if you have other schools in the district that are meeting AYP (although Gateway already offers school choice within the district). We’ve also increased professional development and are working on strengthening district and school improvement plans. This past week, I was asked by the school committee to comment on MCAS testing in general rather than concentrating on the schools’ AYP status. I answered that MCAS is just one piece of the picture and is a bellwether for identifying broad areas in which there may be a problem. I don’t believe it is particularly useful in small schools, in telling us whether schools are successful, or in identifying particular intervention strategies for helping individual students. MCAS tests are given in the spring, with raw data released the following fall. To make data useful it has to be more quickly accessible to staff, easy to interpret, and relevant to the individual student and the staff trying to help that student. Thus, MCAS data is one piece of a puzzle which has to be buttressed by local assessments and matched with staff observations: a triangulation of data which ideally gives staff a better insight on how to assist individual students in maximizing their potential. I believe that the district is cognizant of the problems and moving aggressively to implement potential solutions. Last year’s Educational Quality Assurance Audit identified the same areas of concern and solutions as our administrators and the entire staff (all staff, not just teachers) did. Solutions include developing an updated, K-12 curriculum with performance benchmarks, expanding opportunities for students in the schools, linking district and classroom assessments so that useful information is quickly available to staff, ensuring that staff have the opportunity to share and gain information through professional development, and increasing community and parental involvement in education. As we move forward and develop specific strategies for this I plan on sharing this information with our communities. Given the quality of both our students and our staff—coupled with community involvement—I expect that these efforts will result in increasing student achievement. The result will be the lifting of our AYP status without abandoning our efforts to educate the whole child. ### |
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