The Appleton Area School District Board of Education held a work session on 09/30/2021. During this work session they reviewed the District’s 2020-21 score card to see where they met their goals and where they fell short. The district has 4 “pillars” or areas of focus. Pillar 1, which I recapped yesterday, was focused on creating an Inclusive & Engaging Culture To Support Teaching and Learning. Pillar 2, the focus of this recap, is focused on Student Success and the District’s desire to “ensure every student is academically, socially, and emotionally successful and graduates ready for college, career, and their community.”
There were a lot of missed goals in the area of Student Success, and the data related to various exams and assessments doesn’t necessarily look that good. AASD’s WI Forward Exam results are down markedly compared to last year in every area except 8th grade reading, and that decrease does not seem to be a one-time issue caused by the District’s pandemic response but, rather a consistent thing going back to at least the 2017-18 school year.
The 11th grade ACT scores also seem to have been declining for a number of years. The ELA scores declined 15.4 points from 2016-17 to 2020-21 while Math scores declined by 17 points.
AASD’s graduations rates have been below the statewide average every year since at least the 2017-18 school year.
Steve Harrison, the Assistant Superintendent of Assessment, Curriculum & Instruction, gave the presentation on the District’s Pillar 2 related goals for 2020-21 and where they succeeded and where they fell short. He stated that the scorecard was meant to be a succinct communication tool of what the District focuses on and how they are monitoring the progress of students as well as the action steps the District is taking.
He noted that there was a lot of connection between Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 goals, and they not only recognize the importance of student academic success but also of social and emotional wellbeing. “If students aren’t engaged in their learning, not only does that certainly show up within our academic results but as Polly spoke to, it also shows up within our data regarding inclusive and engaging culture.”
Key Measure/Target 1: TS Gold: During the 2020-21 school year, 90% of 4K students will meet or exceed the widely held expectations of a 4K student 3 key areas.
- number concepts and operations (Objective #20)
- explores and describes spatial relationships and shapes Objective #21)
- compares and measures (Objective #22)
This was a new goal that they added to the scorecard last year. Teaching Strategies Gold is an assessment that they provide to their 4k students. The three key targeted area were chosen because of the body of research and information that indicate that success in those three areas indicates not only future success in mathematics at the 5k-6th grade level but also in literacy. So, they wanted to focus on what would give them the biggest bang for their buck.
They did not fully meet the goal of 90% or more in objectives 20 and 21, but they did for objective 22. He pointed out that they also came close to achieving that 90% goal with Objective 21.
He also noted that there was a great deal of growth throughout the year between the fall and the spring, so, even though they didn’t meet that goal across the board, they came very close in certain areas and saw significant growth in all areas in spite of being virtual for part of the year.
He said that they implemented TS Gold because they didn’t want to wait for the WI Forward exam beginning in 3rd grade to start gathering information about their early learners. Implementing TS Gold had greatly improved their ability to make sure they were taking the data that they have available in early grades to help inform instruction.
Key Measure/Target 2: WI Forward Exam: During the 2020-21 school year, we will increase the percentage of students in grades 3-8 students who scored proficient or advanced in ELA and Math (as a grade level) during 2018-19 by 1%
The WI Forward Exam is a required state assessment that is provided to students throughout the state of WI and is part of AASD’s accountability report card system. It had not been given during the 2019-20 school year due to the abrupt lockdown in the spring, so AASD’s goal was based off of 2018-19 scores. They had wanted to increase the scores of 3rd and 8th grades by 1% from their 2018-19 scores. In 3 of the 4 categories, the scores actually dropped by quite a bit. 3rd grade reading scores decreased by 4.8 percentage points, 3rd grade math scores decreased by 1.8 points, 8th grade math scores dropped by 9.2 percentage points. The only area in which AASD met its goal was in 8th grade reading which increased by 1.2 points.
Assistant Superintendent Harrison said that in talking to his colleagues at other districts, AASD’s decline seemed in line with what other districts had seen.
He also pointed out that the test participation rate was significantly lower than normal for all the different state assessments. Between 10% and 15% of students did not participate. He said that led one to question who did the information represent and who did it not represent?
Key Measure/Target 3: i-Ready Diagnostic: During the 2020-21 school year, 90% of students in grades 5K-8 will reach their targeted growth (one or more years of growth) by the end of the school year.
The 2020-21 school year was AASD’s first year with full, district-wide implementation of i-Ready. It’s an assessment that is given in fall, winter, and spring, and it replaced the MAP assessment which had been the previous assessment tool the district had used.
They set the lofty goal of having 90% or more of AASD students in each grade level reaching their targeted growth. Approximately 73% of students ended up reaching their goal, 17 percentage points lower than their goal. Per Assistant Superintendent Harrison, the i-Ready team said that was right in line with the targeted growth results at other districts. He went on to say that most districts last year who were virtual for at least half the year or more saw approximately 70% or more of that targeted growth. [It sounded to me as if schools that had been in-person during the year had other scores, but he did not state what they were.]
During October staff development meetings, they planned to have each school dig into the i-Ready results from the spring and determine if instruction needed to pivot or be adjusted based on those spring results.
Key Measure/Target 4: Establish baseline data aligned to AASD Portrait of a Graduate Essential Traits
Of all the meetings I follow and recap, AASD meetings are, by far the ones most filled with what to me seems like round about speaking with a lot of specialized acronyms and terms that would not be readily recognizable to members of the public at large. Assistant Superintendent. Case in point, it seems that AASD met this target, but what exactly they did is not clear to me. I don’t know what baseline data they gathered nor the mechanism by which they gathered it, nor what they intend to do with this data going forward. For the sake of accuracy, I’ve transcribed word for word Assistant Superintendent Harrison’s statement regarding this target, so that, even though I don’t understand it, he can speak for himself:
“Our fourth goal here was to establish a baseline data that’s aligned to the Portrait of our Graduate Essential Traits, as you’ve heard us speak, to lead, care, and contributed, and also as Polly mentioned with the Panorama survey, really connecting the two so that as we move forward as a district and we think of our career and life skills being that important piece to pillars 1 and 2, having that baseline so that we can develop goals for moving forward for measuring and improving those outcomes.”
Key Measure/Target 5: ACT composite score: We will increase the 11th-grade student average by .5 points
They did not meet this goal. He did however want to draw their attention to the historical data.
[I’m not sure why he wanted to draw their attention to the historical data because, even discounting this last year as a bad year due to unprecedented circumstances, when I look at their charts it looks to me to mostly be scores that have been declining bit by bit since the 2014-15 school year, which doesn’t really look good.]
They did have ACT scores for the 2019-20 school year because those were given prior to the lockdown and closure of schools.
He again noted that the participation rate was lower than in a normal year which was a trend throughout the state.
Key Measure/Target 6: Increase the four-year graduation rate (certified) by 1%
Again, they did not meet this goal. One thing he did want the Board to keep in mind was that graduation rates for previous years were the certified results, but they did not yet have the certified results for this most recent year yet. When results are certified, they always end up being higher than they were at the conclusion of the school year prior to summer school. The 84.2% graduation rate did not include summer school credit recovery efforts, and he was going to update that when the results were certified which usually takes place during October.
He then moved onto Action Steps that had been planned for 2020-21.
He said action steps were needed to be thought of as “what are the things that we are doing in order to support the achieving of the goals listed up above?”
Many of these Action Steps they did accomplish.
Action Step 1: Develop common assessments in 4K for each unit of study.
They were doing that through Teaching Gold Strategies.
Action Step 2: Establish collaborative approach between district and site administration for implementing a cohesive professional development plan focused on:
- Working and planning through collaborative conversations – PLC
- Standards-based learning design
- Using high-impact practices
- Assessment of and for learning
- Integration to 21st Century skills
He mentioned that they had a total of over 100 staff members who were either district administrators, site administrators, or teacher leaders participating in “teacher clarity training” which would inform the work that we are doing. They also had i-Ready training scheduled for October so that teachers could get better at looking at data from the i-Ready assessment and using those specific results to inform their instruction.
Regarding the integration to 21st Century skills he said, “And then finally as we connect to other areas such as our CTE, College and Technical Education, and career based learning to make sure that we have that multi-year plan that really takes all these important areas of focus and creates a structure that we work through in the years to come, so that really our intention is for our principals and our teachers to know in advance, looking at least 3 years out what is that professional development plan going to look like? How does that fit into the bigger picture? And also, how does it support our educator effectiveness model?”
[To be fair to Assistant Superintendent Harrison, I usually find him fairly easy to follow, but that was another statement of his during this meeting that I listened to and found no meaning in. I sometimes feel that if meeting participants could just speak directly so that they only took 30 seconds to say what currently takes them 2 minutes, AASD meetings would start taking far less time than they currently do.]
Action Step 3: Increase i-Ready data literacy through district professional development
He already spoke to this when discussing the previous action step.
Action Step 4: Align all staff Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) and Personal Professional Goals (PPGs) to site scorecards
He said that this action step had been new to the scorecard for the 2020-21 school year and that starting with last year and continuing forward, all educators would be required to have a Student Learning Objective, otherwise known as a smart goal. It was a measurable goal that was connected directly to student outcomes. They would also a Personal Professional Goal (PPG) which would be some type of goal connected to improving the educator’s practice.
He stated that, at a minimum, the Student Learning Objective, would not be uniform throughout each building. Each school would set one unifying SLO that all teachers would feed into, claim and identify with as part of their individual SLOs. So, if a school set a goal of improving math and literacy outcomes, each teacher would own that goal as their own individual SLO as well. It was meant to ensure that all of their arrows, so to speak, were pointing in the same direction in supporting overall student achievement.
Action Step 5: Perform a district level program analysis of student performance in Social Studies and Science on the WI Forward Exam
- Grades 4 and 8 in Science and,
- Grades 4, 8, and 10 in Social Studies
This was the one action step that they did not complete, but he thought that the new Coherent Governance model was going to help address this particular area. Historically, results that had been reported to the Board had pertain to mathematics and literacy, since those are the two key areas that feed into the state accountability report card that the district receives. However, last year, at this time, when Assistant Superintendent Harrison had shared with the Board about Pillar 2, one or two of the board members had requested that they do an analysis of social students and science programs. [I do recall former Board of Education member Barry O’Connor asking about science and social studies on at least one occasion.]
Given the challenges of the District’s coronavirus response during the previous year, the requested program analysis did not take place; however, he assured the Board that, moving forward and as a result of the adopted Coherent Governance model, he would be reporting to them sometime this fall about science and social studies. Coherent Governance has a Results Policy that includes required reports on English Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, as well as other areas such as Fine Arts, financial literacy, and Career and Technical Education. He concluded that although this action step did not occur this past year. It will certainly occur this upcoming year as required by policy.
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