This is my first trip to the WINNS site, and outside of the painfully long waiting periods, I really enjoyed looking at much of the information. For my first glimpse I focused on the WKCE data and found that we performed about where I expected to. What I was surprised to see is a decrease in our proficient/advanced numbers over the last 5-6 years. It has not been a constant decrease, but it looks to my untrained eyes like a decrease. You can see it HERE.
The next step was to identify the why and my first instinct was to look at the sub groups of race or economic status. The first race/ethnicity probably has not had an impact, while our numbers of students in the Hispanic and Black categories have increased our overall number is still very small and therefore has had a negligible impact on our data.
The second group, economically disadvantaged has grown, and what I noticed was that their scoring has dramatically decreased over that time. It would seem to me that with a group a little over 10% of the overall population decreasing significantly would have the effect of bringing down the overall score slowly, but surely.
Now, there could easily be other, more significant reasons to our decrease, but the fact remains, our economically disadvantaged students are being left further and further behind. Now I suppose we identify the problem, solving it should be easy right?
Last point: We don't really do this in our district. My feeling is that we go on and on about being a data driven district, but I don't recall ever being shown meaningful, straight forward data that made any sense to me. I liked this. I found value in this exercise. I couldn't say the same thing when we have had PD's using data in the past. I wouldn't say we are data driven, but I think I would like to be, as long as we become good drivers.
When looking at the data for my district, I, too, noticed a huge difference in score results for the economic disadvantaged. In some cases, their scores were a good 25% lower than the economic advantaged students. I think this data really needs to be studied further to find the causes and solutions. I would throw out some guesses or questions, but I have to be honest in wondering if I'm just stereotyping, rather than making accurate observations.
ReplyDeleteI have to second what you say about the data and your school as well. Being at a private school, we don't have nearly the data, although in my mind there's no reason that the Diocese couldn't pool test results from all its schools and publish the data. After all, I would also like to know how our students scored in comparison to other schools in our Diocese, not just schools nationally. That number doesn't really tell me anything. Anyway, although our principal gives us a brief overview of the test results, she doesn't give us the chance to brainstorm or address the needs. Instead, she tries to make everything positive and only highlight the positives either to cover herself or not to offend the teachers. I think it may be a little of both.