Making the grade

Schools work to improve test scores

By Lauren Radomski (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Tuesday, November 27, 2007

After a lukewarm report card from the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) in late August, Fergus Falls administrators have developed a plan to improve the school district’s grades.

Each year, the MDE uses test results from the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) to rate reading and math proficiencies in state schools. Schools must show they are making adequate yearly progress (AYP) by meeting a certain set of benchmarks, with the task of meeting the federal No Child Left Behind goal of 100 percent student proficiency by the 2013-2014 school year.

AYP is calculated by subgroups, including students in special education, English language learners, ethnic groups and students receiving free or reduced-price lunches. A school district must make AYP among all subgroups to make AYP as a whole.

This year, special education students at Fergus Falls Middle School, all students at the Area Learning Center and African American students across the district did not meet math proficiency targets. As a result, the district must submit an improvement plan to the state, a plan Curriculum Coordinator Carri Thompson presented to the school board Monday.

“This is our formal plan to the state for how we are going to have those students get back on track so that our district and our schools are making adequate progress,” she said. The 60-page report was created by a committee of 17 teachers, administrators and parents over the course of six weeks this fall.

The plan also addresses what the state calls Safe Harbor areas, those in which the district is just short of proficiency requirements but very close. These areas include reading proficiency among high school and middle school special education students, math proficiency among Cleveland Elementary students and math proficiency among middle school students receiving free or reduced-price lunches.

Key to the district’s improvement, Thompson said, will be it’s new math curricula, implemented this fall. Another piece is staff development, training that requires 10 percent of the funds intended to close the gap between high and low-income students.

“It’s frustrating to me to re-allocate the Title I money,” Thompson said, “and that’s $28,000 that really should be going directly to helping children.

We had to reorganize and pull that away so that we can do more and more training with teachers, because the assumption is if we’re not making (AYP), it must be a teacher problem — that’s what No Child Left Behind says.”

The district also plans to encourage the use of Professional Learning Communities, Thompson said, “taking a situation to a group of peers, having them look at it, asking what their experiences have been, what their insight might be, and then taking all of that expertise into mind to act to try to solve the problem most efficiently and get students back on track for achievement.”

Another part of the district’s improvement plan is study of an approach called Response to Intervention, which involves individualized learning strategies for underachieving students.

Other improvement efforts include:

• Updating the district’s student information system so staff have better access to data needed to make instructional decisions

• Providing ongoing training for all staff regarding math and reading strategies implemented across all curricula

• Including special education and Alternative Learning Center teachers in curriculum and instruction research, as well as decision making

• Researching transition strategies so as not to lose students between grades

Although the district’s improvement plan outlines its work for the next two years, teachers and administrators will need to start implementing those changes immediately, Thompson said.

“Between now and April (when students will take the MCAs again), we need to do all that we can to work with this plan so that students have some advantage when they take the test,” she said.

“The key is to communicate the plan,” said Superintendent Jerry Ness. “It’s one thing to write it, but to get it in practice is another.”

With approval from the school board Monday, the district’s AYP improvement plan will be reviewed by Lakes Country Service Cooperative in the next two weeks before submission to the MDE.

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