I thought it would be nice to go back to the 11/28/2022 Appleton Area School District Board of Education meeting and highlight their discussion about the District’s 2021-22 State Report Card. I wasn’t able to write-about it at the time because of my busier than usual work schedule, but I do think that the State Report Card Score is something that warrants a look.
I’ve prepared a complete transcript of the presentation by Assistant Superintendent Steve Harrison as well as the discussion and questions from the Board members.
The Department of Public Instruction grades schools on a scale of 0-100 using the following rating categories:
- Fails to Meet Expectations: 0 – 47.9
- Meets Few Expectations: 48 – 57.9
- Meets Expectations: 58 – 69.9
- Exceeds Expectations: 70 – 82.9
- Significantly Exceeds Expectations: 83 – 100
Over the last 6 years, the District’s score has increased every year until this most recent year when it dropped back to 2016-17 levels.
- 2016-17: 66.9 (“Meets Expectations”)
- 2017-18: 68.5 (“Meets Expectations”)
- 2018-19: 70.1 (just barely at “Exceeds Expectations”)
- 2019-20: No score due to Covid
- 2020-21: 71.4 (“Exceeds Expectations”)
- 2021-22: 66.6 (“Meets Expectations”)
AASD’s overall score on the report card was determined by its score in four areas: Achievement, Growth, Target Group, and On-Track To Graduation, and it received the following scores in those areas.
- Achievement: 58.5 (just barely at “Meets Expectations”)
- Growth: 69.8 (“Meets Expectations”)
- Target Group Outcomes: 56.2 (“Meets Few Expectations”)
- On-Track To Graduation: 80.8 (“Significantly Exceeds Expectation”)
The Student Achievement scores indicated both that (a) AASD’s performance had been decreasing each year going back to 2018 years and (b) AASD has been underperforming against the state average going back to at least 2018.
In terms of its Growth score, AASD had outperformed the state average, but that growth did not seem to be translating into Student Achievement gains (which, as noted, had decreased each year since 2018.)
I found the presentation odd in that one of its focuses was essentially to explain how one could not use the score to compare schools or districts to each other. As Assistant Superintendent Harrison said, “It’s important to remember that these are meant to be an internal tool to look at school improvement, outcomes, and what measures are being taken to continuously improve within those different areas. In all honesty, I truly would not compare one school to another or one district to another, any more than I would compare my own four children and their report cards.”
There were understandable reasons for that perspective.
- The scores were based on several years’ worth of student scores on state assessments, but there was no data for the 2019-20 year because the state opted to not give those assessments due to the emergence of Covid.
- The way the “Growth” and “Student Achievement” scores impacted the overall report card score for a district or individual school varied depending on the percentage of the student body comprised of economically disadvantaged students. Per Assistant Superintendent Harrison, “The higher the percentage a school or district has of students who are economically disadvantaged, the more Growth will carry as a weight towards the report card score, and the less Student Achievement will carry towards the report card score.”
- The “Target Group” score was a complicated measure based on several years of data that was aimed first at identifying students who scored in the bottom 25% on state assessments and then seeing how they improved academically year-over-year. Additionally, the score seemed to try to follow the students so a student might be put in the “Target Group” during 8th grade, but instead of the score attaching to the middle school, it would end up being associated with the high school the student ended up at the following year. Beyond that, by the time the District receives the score, a number of the students in that target group may no longer even be in the school district.
The “Target Group” score in particular seemed to be particularly useless to the District in terms of identifying which students needed help. Assistant Superintendent Harrison straight up said of the Target Growth score, “To put it in crude terms, this is the autopsy, right? This is after the fact.” He explained that the District used other tools to identify students who needed help and, at most, the Target Growth score was a way to, after the fact, affirm that they had already identified the students who were struggling or to reveal that there were struggling students the District had failed to identify.
Superintendent Greg Hartjes also said, “So again, this is of little value to schools, school districts, because we already have all the data that we’re putting in our results policies and in our scorecards that we’re already working to improve. So, this is just packaging it in another way that the state maybe finds important, but as a school, and as a district, we really don’t.”
One thing of note regarding the “Target Group” score was that the target group (i.e., the students who scored in the bottom 25% on state assessments) was compared against the non-target group (i.e., the rest of the students in the district) in achievement, growth, chronic absenteeism, and graduation. The target group students received exactly the same Growth score as the non-target students; however, in terms of actual achievement, the target group students only scored 21.4 as compared to the 74.2 of the non-target group students, a difference of 52.8. Additionally, a score of 21.4 would put the Achievement score of the target group students well within the bottom-most “Fails to Meet Expectations” range.
Board member Ed Ruffolo asked about the difference between the Growth score and the Achievement score saying, “I’m having trouble understanding how we can be strong in growth and low on achievement.”
Assistant Superintendent Harrison responded that they would expect the target group to score very low in achievement because, by definition, that it how they put in the target group to begin with. “In this case, we are seeing that students did better in terms of improvement from one year to the next, but it’s improvement within that lower end of the spectrum versus a large amount of improvement that would also show a high achievement at the same time. So, we’re seeing students improve, but not to the extent compared to their peers in which they are then achieving at a much higher level. […] think of it almost like i-Ready when I’ve talked about that in the past with you. Remember how we have our typical growth score, and then we have what’s called our stretch growth, right. And that stretch growth is what would actually put you at grade level. But if our students are already struggling significantly, it’s going to be even that much more growth that would be needed to put them at that level of achievement.”
Board member Jim Bowman did not seem to find the report particularly helpful, particularly in regards to the “Target Group” score saying, “[T]he bottom-line purpose of a report like this is for people to take corrective action and that means administrators and educators at every level. But to do that, they’ve got to understand it. And this thing’s hard to understand.” He thought somebody needed to sit down with each building principal and help interpret the school data so that it made sense to the principal.
Assistant Superintendent Harrison said that both he and Sheree Garvey did meet with the District’s middle schools and talk through the data and what they were currently seeing in the buildings.
[I found it odd that there was very little discussion about the actual scores themselves and what they said about the quality of the education parents could expect their students to receive. Early in the presentation, Assistant Superintendent Harrison stressed, “When we talk about, again, report cards issued by this state, it’s important to remember that these are meant to be an internal tool to look at school improvement, outcomes, and what measures are being taken to continuously improve within those different areas.” However, these reports are public record and publicly posted on the DPI website specifically so that the public can review them. It’s hard to imagine they are only intended to be an internal tool and not something by which the public and parents of prospective students are able to judge the quality of a particular school or district.
An overall score of 66.6 seems awfully low. In a traditional grading scale that would be a D. A score 1/3 down from the top is equivalent to a credit score of 667 which is only at the top of the “Fair” range. Heck, to be a barber, the state of Wisconsin requires a minimum score of 75 on the state licensing exam.
The steady, decline in achievement scores since 2018 seems concerning but was not addressed. It’s hard to see how a score of 58.5 on a 100-point scale (which would be a straight up F on a traditional 100-point grading scale) is an acceptable result when we’re talking about the basic math and English skills of our community’s youth. Even accepting the “Meets Expectations” range, it should be pointed out that AASD was a mere 0.6 points away from the substandard “Meets Few Expectations” range.
Another point never discussed was how exactly the District’s “On-Track To Graduate” score was able to be so high when overall academic achievement was so low. It was touched on that attendance rates were a factor in the score, but when student achievement has been consistently below the state average it seems odd that graduation rates would be exceeding expectations.
I pulled the report cards for School Choice students at various Appleton private schools. There were four schools that had enough students to generate report card scores. The achievement scores for voucher students at those schools were significantly higher than the achievement score achieved by AASD, ranging from 73.2 to 83.4.
Riverview Lutheran was the highest achieving elementary school, with its voucher students getting an 81.3 achievement score, and it should be noted that 47.8% of those voucher students were economically disadvantaged. AASD’s Foster Elementary just a few blocks away with a fairly similar 52.8% of economically disadvantaged students had an achievement score of only 49.6.
It’s hard to look at these numbers and come away thinking they don’t mean anything or that they shouldn’t be used to compare and contrast schools or that parents should not be taking these scores into account when trying to decide where to send their children to school. It seems to me that AASD may want to consider being a little less dismissive of these numbers and what they mean and how they are interpreted by the public.]
View full meeting details here: http://go.boarddocs.com/wi/aasd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=CJNS69710C75
View full meeting video here: https://youtu.be/omvW4J2vjf8
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