Achievement Gap Solutions For Parents

Very real-world down to earth statements of facts and advice for parents are offered on Achievement Gap Solutions for Parents  a  website put together by a parent in the Cleveland Heights-University Heights school district.  Carla, the mother of two children; ages 13 and 17 describes her motivation:  

My passion is to empower parents, by giving information, knowledge, tips and strategies on how to help your child achieve academic success and have fun doing it. . . . .not teaching you knowledge from a book, but knowledge from my own experience of working with schools, teachers, administrators, gifted coordinators, PTAs, Parent Councils, foreign exchange programs, etc.

The number one solution to the achievement gap?  Parent involvement.

Parent Involvement means overseeing and expecting academic achievement of your child; on all grade levels. Parent Involvement also means and probably more importantly learning how to advocate for your child.

Ohio Graduation Test Results

Preliminary results were released today for the March 2009 administration.  Schools and districts have not verified these results.  The final figures may differ due to appeals, late scoring and other changes.  More information is available on the Ohio Graduation Test section of the ODE website.

Shaker’s results –  

OHIO DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION
OHIO GRADUATION TESTS – PRELIMINARY RESULTS
GRADE 10 – PUBLIC DISTRICTS
MARCH 2009 TEST ADMINISTRATION

Subject	Percent Prof. Or Above	Percent Adv	Percent Accel	Percent Prof	Percent Basic	Percent Limited
Reading	91.2	31.1	29.7	30.4	6.3	2.4
Mathematics	85.5	44.0	21.5	20.0	7.5	7.0
Writing	93.9	8.3	55.3	30.3	4.2	2.0
Science	80.9	34.3	22.0	24.6	14.7	4.3
Soc. Studies	89.3	41.7	20.2	27.3	6.1	4.6
All Five	76.4

Graduation in Shaker – Data by Race

Shaker was reported to have a 68.1% graduation rate using the Cumulative Promotion Index method to calculate graduation rates for 2006.  Data for grade by grade promotion rates are available from the ODE website using the Power User Report function.  For the 2005-06 school year reported promotion rates were 80.8%, 90.2%, 97.1%, and 96.0% for 9^th, 10^th, 11^th and 12^th grades at SHHS.  Multiplying these rates yields a cumulative promotion rate of 67.9% for all students – virtually identical to the rate reported by Diplomas Count 2009.

 Data from the ODE are also available broken out by race.  For the 2005-06 school year reported grade specific promotion rates at SHHS were 98.8%, 98.9%, 100.0%, and 100.0% for white students and 71.0%, 83.3%, 94.3%, and 92.2% for black students.  Thus the cumulative promotion rates are 97.7% for white students and 51.4% for black students. 

 Yes you read that correctly. 

 SHHS effective graduation rates are:

All Shaker students           68%

White Shaker students     98%

Black Shaker students      51%

Not quite sure what to say to this.  Certainly some of the dismally poor result for black students must be related to students transferring to Shaker in 9^th grade without the necessary academic preparation to succeed, but that can’t possibly explain a 49% failure rate. 

Ohio Achievement Test results broken out by race for 7^th and 8^th grades show that about 30% of black students at SMS are non-proficient in reading and about 40% are non-proficient in math.  Less than 2% of white students are non-proficient in either subject.  Doesn’t take too much of a leap to connect the dots and conclude that the non-proficient students in 7^th and 8^th grade are not going to make it out of 9^th grade.  Or out of high school.

Shaker’s Real Graduation Rate

The specific results for Shaker Heights from the Diplomas Count report (described yesterday) show that 68.1% of students graduate.  This is completely and shockingly different from the most recently reported graduation rate of 95.7% from the ODE Report Card for Shaker.  The report shows that of the students who don’t make it to graduation, most (55.9%) are lost in the promotion from 9th grade to 10th grade. 

This approach seems to be a more meaningful and useful way to evaluate the effectiveness of a high school than does calculating the number of 12th grade students who graduate.  If you never get out of 9th grade you are certainly not going to be graduating.  Worse than that, one could speculate that kids who don’t get promoted from 9th to 10th grade are going to have a pretty hard time surviving and becoming productive members of society.  

And this is in Shaker Heights – perceived as one of the best school districts in the area.

Graduation Rates – Diplomas Count 2009

An interesting article on graduation rates in today’s PD describes a new report on graduation rates across the country. 

“This year’s report found three out of every 10 U.S. public high school students do not graduate. That amounts to 1.3 million students a year.

Ohio did well in the analysis, coming in about 5 percentage points higher than the national average with a 74.3 percent graduation rate. The state also ranked ninth in improvement between 1996 and 2006.

Like most other states, Ohio uses a different calculation than the one used in “Diplomas Count.” Under the state formula, about 86 percent of the Class of 2006 graduated in both Ohio and Euclid.”

The report, Diplomas Count 2009, uses the Cumulative Promotion Index (CPI) method to calculate graduation rates.  This method represents the entire high school experience rather than the single event of graduation from grade 12 by capturing the four key steps a student must take in order to graduate: three grade-to-grade promotions and graduation from grade 12.  This method, similar to the Promoting Power calculation, yields more useful and meaningful information for evaluating high school efficacy than does looking only at the grade 12 graduation rates.

Failure to Acknowledge and Act on Differences in Teacher Effectiveness

You may have heard that there are no bad teachers in Shaker.   The Widget Effect, a recently released report from the New Teacher Project, provides evidence that this is true.  The report examines teacher evaluation in 12 public school districts across the US and finds that despite variations in evaluation systems and the timing of evaluations school districts nationwide fail to evaluate teachers in any meaningful way. 

“Suppose you are a parent determined to make sure your child gets the best possible education. You understand intuitively what an ample body of research proves: that your child’s education depends to a large extent on the quality of her teachers. Consequently, as you begin considering local public schools, you focus on a basic question: who are the best teachers, and where do they teach? 

The question is simple enough. There’s just one problem—except for word of mouth from other parents, no one can tell you the answers.

In fact, you would be dismayed to discover that not only can no one tell you which teachers are most effective, they also cannot say which are the least effective or which fall in between. Were you to examine the district’s teacher evaluation records yourself, you would find that, on paper, almost every teacher is a great teacher, even at schools where the chance of a student succeeding academically amounts to a coin toss, at best.

In short, the school district would ask you to trust that it can provide your child a quality education, even though it cannot honestly tell you whether it is providing her a quality teacher.

This is the reality for our public school districts nationwide. Put simply, they fail to distinguish great teaching from good, good from fair, and fair from poor. A teacher’s effectiveness—the most important factor for schools in improving student achievement—is not measured, recorded, or used to inform decision-making in any meaningful way.”

In public education it’s not all the children who are above average, it’s all the teachers.  In fact all the teachers are either good or great.

Intelligence and How to Get It

Nicholas Kristof’s column in today’s NYT discusses Richard Nisbett’s new book “Intelligence and How to Get It”.   The fundamental conclusion seems to be that nurture is more important than nature in human intelligence.  Intelligence as a process rather than a fixed inborn trait.

“In the mosaic of America, three groups that have been unusually successful are Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks….    These three groups may help debunk the myth of success as a simple product of intrinsic intellect, for they represent three different races and histories. In the debate over nature and nurture, they suggest the importance of improved nurture — which, from a public policy perspective, means a focus on education.”

More evidence, if any were needed, that the path to a solution to poverty and inequality in America goes through the schoolhouse door.