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District presentation: mixed assessment results, high school on downward trajectory and several schools in state improvement tiers
Summary
District assessment director presented winter and benchmark data showing variability across schools, a drop in ninth-grade course pass rates and the high school placed in a state improvement tier because of graduation rates, district staff said.
Kurt (name not specified), who presented district assessment results at the Feb. 27 Yelm Community Schools board meeting, told directors that the district shows pockets of strong performance but wide variability across schools and grade levels.
"There is a lot of variability between schools," Kurt said. "We have 40 to 60% of our kids that are where we want them to be on any one measure. But that also means we've got 40 to 60 kids depending on the measure that aren't where we want them to be."
Kurt reviewed benchmark assessments, adaptive computer-based tests and social-emotional measures. Examples in the presentation included kindergarten letter-sound mastery increasing from 18% at fall benchmark to 36% at winter benchmark in one cited dataset, and a range of school-level growth showing some schools gaining substantially while others showed little change.
At the secondary level Kurt reported that 65% of ninth-graders passed all their semester courses in the most recent reporting period, down from 75% the prior year. The district also reported declines in on-track credit metrics across grade levels compared with last year; staff said limited capacity to run credit recovery programs this school year is constraining students' ability to make up missing credits.
Kurt described district use of multiple instruments, including a student-completed "SABERS" survey and the teacher-completed DESSA measure, to track social-emotional and belonging indicators. District results showed generally low percentages of students flagged at high risk on those instruments and increases in belonging metrics in several domains.
Kurt walked the board through the Washington School Improvement Framework, which aggregates multiple measures (Smarter Balanced proficiency and growth, multilingual proficiency, attendance, ninth-grade on-track, graduation rates and dual-credit enrollment) by student groups and assigns schools to support tiers. He said several elementary schools were in the state's foundational level, two schools (Prairie and Fort Stevens) were in tier 3 and the high school is also in tier 3 because of graduation-rate metrics.
"If you really look at the data, there's a lot of — we have 40 to 60% of our kids that are where we want them to be on any one measure," Kurt said. "That's something we're really concerned about."
District leaders said they will use the assessment findings as input for the upcoming strategic-planning process.
