AASD parents and, to some degree, members of the community at large have been itching to find out what students’ 1st semester grades are this year as compared to their grades last year. On 01/27/2021 the Board of Education held a work session to, among other things, review students’ academic progress.
You can download the PDF presentation here:
During this work session it was revealed that, shockingly, AASD does not keep coherent, systematized records of students’ progress from semester to semester or year to year.
Steve Harrison, Assistant Superintendent for Assessment, Curriculum & Instruction, gave the presentation on where AASD high schoolers are academically as of the end of the first semester and he laid out three challenges he faced in collecting data.
1. Progress monitoring of grades has historically been done at the site level.
AASD has not gathered and monitored student progress systematically at a district-wide level. Moving forward they intend to rectify this oversight and conduct district-wide data reporting and analysis on a quarterly basis at a minimum.
2. Infinite Campus only provides data for time period report is requested.
Apparently, the developers of Infinite Campus did not build into their system a way to create reports for historical time-frames. Infinite Campus users can generate reports of where things are at the time they request the report, but they cannot go in and generate a report about where things were a semester ago or a year ago. Steve Harrison did state that he was working with someone to problem solve that issue. At a minimum, he was able to generate a report of where grades are at this moment and will be able to generate reports at set intervals going forward, so that AASD will be able to start tracking this data. Unfortunately, they do not have grades from last year to compare the current report to.
3. Each high school has had its own unique window for opening and
closing Infinite Campus and Canvas.
These dates are only off from each other by a day or two, but, given that Infinite Campus only generates reports for information available at the time the report is requested, that lack of syncing between high schools can be an issue.
Moving forward they plan to have one standard window for when Infinite Campus is open and closed.
There was also a 4th issue, though not as severe as the 3 previous challenges. There is a lag period between when letter grades and number of credits earned can be simultaneously analyzed.
Basically, there is a 2 week period after the end of the semester when students who have been given an “incomplete” in a class can convert that to a letter grade and potentially pass, so everything is not set totally in stone at the end of a semester.
With that background laid, the current number of AASD high school students with at least one F was presented.
- 12th Grade: 287 students (23.11%)
- 11th Grade: 319 students (27.86%)
- 10th Grade: 341 students (30.31%)
- 9th Grade: 323 students (29.61%)
- All Grades Total: 1270 students (27.59%)
The number of students currently with “incompletes” was also reviewed.
- 12th Grade: 192 students (15.46%)
- 11th Grade: 272 students (23.76%)
- 10th Grade: 237 students (21.07%)
- 9th Grade: 226 students (20.71%)
- All Grades Total: 927 students (20.14%)
There is no doubt a lot of overlap between the number of students with at least one F and the number of students with incompletes. The students with incompletes still have the opportunity to convert those into, potentially passing, letter grades, but the Fs are unlikely to be able to be changed.
Also reviewed was the number of students receiving special services who had at least one F.
- Students with disabilities make up 11.76% of the student population, but they account for 22.52% of the students with Fs.
- Students receiving free or reduced meals make up 25.18% of the student population, but they account for 53.70% of the students with Fs
- English Learners make up 6.68% of the student population, but they account for 15.83% of the students with Fs.
As Steve pointed out, though, this is not something specific to the Special Education Department or the English Learning Department. Rather, these failure rates are a universal issue by which students within their service groups are most impacted.
They also reviewed the number of students on track to graduate as of the second semester of last year. AASD is still currently in the window of time when students can convert incompletes to letter grades so they have not finalized students’ credits as of 01/27/2021. Once those have been finalized he will be able to update the Board on how many students are on track to graduate.
Basically, students are considered to be on track to graduate if they get 6 credits a year, for a total of 24 over the course of high school; however, 6 credit increments are guidelines and not definitive thresholds. And it should be noted that credit number earned alone does not address the requirement that a certain number of those credits must be within a specific area of learning.
As of last year’s second semester the number of students on track to graduate were as follows:
- Last Year’s 9th Grade (this year’s 10th grade): 76.9%
- Last Year’s 10th Grade (this year’s 11th grade): 75.5%
- Last Year’s 11th Grade (this year’s 12th grade): 74.6%
That means that, as of the end of last year, about 25% of high schoolers were not on track to graduate. Additionally, as with the number of students with Fs, the students receiving special services are most behind. Less than half of last year’s 11th graders who were English Learners or Students With Disabilities are on track to graduate.
We won’t know where things stand currently for another few weeks once incompletes have been finalized.
[All in all, when I look at these numbers, it’s hard to not come away thinking that things appear very dire. It’s almost incomprehensible to me that Superintendent Baseman and the Board of the Education were not requiring grades to be tracked from semester to semester and year to year. That alone speaks volumes regarding Judy Baseman’s managerial acumen and the current Board of Education’s interest in providing oversight to the school district.
The best case scenario is that the high number of students with Fs and students not on track to graduate are abnormal and have been caused by the circumstances of the last year, which indicates AASD has only failed its students for the last 10 months.
The worst case scenario is that these numbers are not abnormal and AASD has been failing its students for many years.
Unfortunately, due to the fact that the district has not kept any systematic records on student grades, it’s impossible to know exactly what the level of their failure is. I would say that the 27.59% of high schoolers who have failed at least one class are not the only ones who deserve Fs.]
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