The Appleton Area School District Board of Education held a work session on 09/30/2021 during which they reviewed the goals and action plans the district planned for the 2021-22 school year. They had four areas of focus that aligned with the four pillars of the district’s mission. Pillar 2 focuses on Student Success and is aimed at ensuring every student is academically, socially, and emotionally successful and graduates ready for college/career and their community.
Steve Harrison, Assistant Superintendent of Assessment, Curriculum, and Instruction, gave the presentation on the Pillar 2 goals and actions for the 2021-22 school year.
Key Measure/Target 1: Increase the overall percentage of students scoring proficient/advanced (WI Forward (3-8)/ACT Aspire (9-10)/ACT (11)) or at or above grade level (i-Ready (5K-8) by 1% from 2021 to 2022.
He started out by saying there were two things to highlight here. “You’ll see that we will continue to improve incrementally from one year to the next, but the two big changes from last year to this year is that, in the past, we were more focused in grade 3 and grade 8 knowing that those are the two grade levels that directly impact our state report card. One of the changes you’ll see here is that now it’s all those grade levels within, so it’s not just isolating a handful of grade levels within our goal, but to see an overall improvement among each grade level within WI Forward, which again covers grades 3-8, ACT Aspire which is grades 9 and 10, and the ACT for our Juniors, as well as i-Ready which covers grades 5K-8. So, in other words, we’re focusing on all the grade levels collectively and not just those that are identified in the state report card for seeing an incremental increase from last year to this year in each of those different assessments.”
[He did not at all discuss the fact that a 1 percentage point increase from the 2020-21 scores will in many areas still leave students woefully behind where they were in 2018-19 prior to the pandemic. For example, the number of 3rd graders who scored proficient in math dropped from 44.4% in 2018-19 to 39.6%. Math proficiency in 8th graders dropped from 34.7% to 25.5%. With a 1 percentage point increase per year, it will take 5 years to get the 3rd grade numbers back to what they were and 9 years to get the 8th grade scores back to what they were. With the various ACT Aspire and ACT scores we’re looking at drops of 3 to 10 to even more. It seems like a basic acknowledgement of just how far student proficiency dropped due to the district’s pandemic response last year would have been in order.]
Key Measure/Target 2: Reduce the achievement gap in literacy and mathematics on the i-Ready (5K-8), WI Forward (3-8), ACT Aspire (9-10), and ACT (11) assessments by 3% from 2021 to 2022.
- Between Black and White students
- Between English Learners and non-English Learners
- Between Students with Disabilities and Students without Disabilities
Their rationale for focusing on these three groups was that they were the areas where they have seen discrepancies across the board historically in their various assessment tools and metrics.
Key Measure/Target 3: i-Ready Diagnostic: During the 2021-22 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.
In spite of the fact that last year only 73% of students achieved their targeted growth, the District decided to keep the goal at 90% because they hoped to remain fully in person this year [and presumably felt that improved their chances of hitting that 90% target.]
Key Measure/Target 4: TS Gold: During the 2021-22 school year and as defined below, 4K students will meet or exceed the widely held expectations of a 4K student in:
- number concepts and operations (Objective #20)
- explores and describes spatial relationships and shapes Objective #21)
- compares and measures (Objective #22)
Last year they set a goal of 90% of students meeting expectations in these three areas. They did not meet that goal for objectives 20 and 21, but they did meet it for objective 22. As a result, they were going to maintain their goal of 90% for objectives 20 and 21 and increase the score in objective 22 by 1 percentage point.
Key Measure/Target 5: Increase the four-year graduation rate (certified) by 1% from 2021 to 2022
They do not know what the final target will be yet because graduation rates have not yet been finalized and certified. They do want to make sure they’re moving forward and not seeing it trend downward.
They plan to monitor the progress of these goals via:
- Fall, Winter i-Ready (5K – 8)
- AASD District Assessment Inventory
- High School failures/incompletes by grade level and content area per semester
Regarding the “AASD District Assessment Inventory” he noted that they have a number of internal tools that they use for progress monitoring that help them progress monitor beyond the larger assessments that take place. They will also be making sure that they track the district number of Fs and Incompletes per semester so that they can look at where there are concentrations of Fs or Incompletes within either grade levels or specific courses.
He then moved on to the action steps they planned to take to accomplish the goals they had set out.
Action Step 1: Develop common assessments in 4K for each unit of study.
They will continue to develop and refine the common assessments that support the instruction connected to the TS Gold metrics. [I laughed a little as I wrote that sentence. It seems like AASD employees use a lot of buzzwords and corporate speak. It starts to sound meaningless after a while. On top of basic grades, just how many assessments do they need to have?]
Action Step 2: Complete Root Cause Analysis and implement PDSA Cycles for addressing achievement gaps among
- Black and White students
- EL and non-EL students
- Students with Disabilities and Students without Disabilities
[PDSA stands for Plan-Do-Study-Act.] He said this was one of their key action steps this year. Completing a root cause analysis was a very specific strategy for looking at the “why” behind the data and asking themselves if a given action step was specifically known to impact student learning, if it was something within the District’s control, and if it was something they could actually implement within the time period available to them. They wanted to not only press monitor student outcomes but also progress monitor their action steps at the same time.
Action Step 3: Build staff capacity in Teacher Clarity and High-Performing PLCs through district late starts, PLCs, and staff development
Steve stated, “As you heard me reference before, both yesterday and today we have staff members throughout the district participating in Teacher Clarity training, knowing that it’s, again, not mutually exclusive–the work we do in our professional learning communities and through our late starts as well as being very intentional in our instruction, our learning intentions and our success criteria in particular–how those both go hand in hand in the work that we do throughout all of our levels. So, building our capacity there.”
[When you look at that written out, it appears meandering and unclear. It’s not a coherent sentence or set of sentences but instead just one big, disjointed run-on thought that listeners are left to interpret. It’s a little ridiculous to me that he’s talking about “teacher clarity” when, looking at his words written out, he is practically incomprehensible. What I think he was saying is that AASD is conducting Teacher Clarity training sessions, and, in addition to that, they have other staff development opportunities including Professional Learning Communities and the things that happen during late start days. None of those opportunities are mutually exclusive and are all supposed to work hand in hand. Although unstated, the presumable end goal is to improve student academic performance. I would have appreciated a greater explanation as to how any of those things are going to improve student performance because, right now, it looks like grades have been declining for a number of years and the things AASD has been doing have not been improving academic outcomes. Are more sessions, training, and data really going to change anything?]
Action Step 4: Align all staff Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) and Personal Professional Goals (PPGs) to site scorecards
They want to continue aligning Student Learning Objectives with Personal Professional Goals which was another way of saying that they want individual school goals to directly impact the goals laid out in the district scorecard.
Action Step 5: Implementation of Culturally & Linguistically Responsive (CLR) strategies and practices within all AASD classrooms
Implementing CLR district-wide was also a Pillar 1 goal, and he noted that Pillar 1 and Pillar 2 goals and action steps go hand in hand. Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Practices not only influence behavior but also influence instruction. He said they plan to provide the Board an opportunity to hear not only from the Leadership Team but also from the people implementing these strategies within classrooms so that the Board can get a clear picture of what CLR looks like and how it’s been beneficial to AASD students.
He then opened things up for questions.
Board member Jim Bowman was pleased with their focus on reducing the achievement gap. He wanted to know how school principals and educators learn about the scorecard goals.
Steve answered that that’s part of what they do within their “Lead Learner Sessions”. They typically hold those sessions once a month, and in them they meet with all of the school building principals and associate principals as a way to support school improvement work. He said that, for example, this spring they talked about closing out the end of year scorecard and in the summer, they talked about what the next year’s scorecard was going to look like. He stated they always start with the district scorecard first so that whatever occurs within the department and school building scorecards is directly aligned with what the overall district goals are.
He went on to say that every school has what is called a CSIP (Continuous School Improvement Process) partner. That person is a district administrator who partners with the school, attends all their continuous school improvement meetings, and acts as a bridge between the district work the site-specific work.
Board member Ed Ruffolo also thanked them for their focus on the achievement gap. He noted that right now they were only looking at student Failures and Incompletes and asked, “Would there also be value in adding the D letter grade to that as well because I know D is passing but that might help inform us, particularly if you could look at it by those different groups. They may be passing, but they’re struggling. In particularly as education’s cumulative if they’re getting Ds at some of the earlier foundational classes that’s gonna carry forward to the other ones, so I’m just curious if you see value in that.”
Steve answered that including that could provide them additional information as to where they see students earning credits but still struggling. “To be honest I think where things can sometimes get a little bit cloudy is when we also look at pluses and minuses knowing that really those reporting categories don’t ultimately benefit where we see the support needed or not, so, yeah, I think that’s definitely something within how we pull our data that we can look at what does this look like at the end of each semester to help inform our practices moving forward.” [I hope they do that, because I don’t see much of a difference between a D and a F from the standpoint of what the students have learned, and it’s hard to see how students would be served if they stop getting Fs only to start getting Ds.]
Board Member Kris Sauter wanted to know if they were also looking at advanced classes and what motivates students to take those. She also wondered if they had any historical data regarding that.
Steve said they were working behind the scenes to create a “data calendar” regarding information that they need to collect. Advanced class data was a key component of that. He said that letter grade outcomes are important, but beyond that they need to look at opportunities. What are the things within their control that they have not necessarily fully implemented for all students? He said they do see students who are under-served.
He said the data calendar they were creating would allow him to spend much less time pulling data and a lot more time actually analyzing and making decisions and implementing changes based on that data.
Ed noted that the 20b objective of Key Target 4 had them aiming for 90 when they were only at 78. That seemed like a significant reach and he wondered how they were going to focus on that and whether the district was really able to achieve it.
Steve said that they did not have a full explanation for last year’s i-Ready results given that they were virtual for part of the year and in-person for part of the year. “Also, another challenge from being virtual last year was the fidelity of the actual test being administered.” There was a big difference between a test administered at home vs. one in a proctored environment. Rather than change the goal this year they thought it would be best to maintain that high bar and but see how the results look when it is administered in the school setting. When they get those results, then they’ll be able to decide what adjustments to the goal will be warranted.
Regarding supporting students, on October 21 a personalized i-Ready trainer will be coming to each building and meeting all of the staff members who participate in the i-Ready assessment. The purpose of the meeting is to dig into how to take the information the i-Ready platform provides and turn that into actionable, data-driven steps so that they can reach that targeted goal by the end of the year.
View full meeting details here: http://go.boarddocs.com/wi/aasd/Board.nsf/goto?open&id=C6WNT661183F
View video of meeting here: https://youtu.be/XW1wjFFAVSw
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