Discussing equity, equality and school funding at the ED task force meeting

Take a look at what E&R puts out for its evaluation reports. They don't measure effectiveness any way that would make sense to most of us. They have a study on what is effective for at-risk students. They selected a handful of what they call "at risk" students. They don't look at their actual success, but rather at their Effectiveness Index residuals. They themselves say that individual student residuals are not reliable and should not be used. But they use them. They find a handful of "at risk" students who had positive residuals. This does not mean they are successful at school or not successful. It means they did better than predicted by EI. And EI would predict that students who are at grade level would score below grade level. So, they may have positive residuals and be going from above to below grade. These handful of students were examined to see how they could have positive residuals. They concluded the students must be resilient.

Take another and read it. They all make no sense. This study makes no sense. And it gives no useful information about effective practices.

How would the board get this department to do a useful study? The board members are not qualified to design educational research studies. They could request one but do you really think E&R is capable of doing one?

The board has requested a report that would tell how many students meet the EVAAS criteria for top middle school math placement. They requested this about 6 months ago. They requested this so they would have time to correct placement errors before school started. In July, Ken Branch reported that he would have to pull every child's file individually to see if they met the requirements and where they were placed. I seriously doubt if this is true, but if it were true, and thousands of pulling those files would have resulted in thousands of low income and minority students who meet the criteria being properly placed, then why were those files not pulled and checked? And why is there no record-keeping system in place for recording a students' data that is used for placement criteria, and then recording the enrollment recommendation? Are they still recording on paper data that is irrelevant to the math placement criteria? Months after that, Ken Branch presents some overall numbers showing how many students meet the EVAAS criteria. He doesn't know how many students meet the other criteria. That is not recorded anywhere, even though they say all students who meet the criteria will be properly placed unless there is a compelling reason recorded. Teacher judgement cannot keep a kid out but all the compelling reasons are teacher judgement and none are recorded. Branch did not know how many of the students who are properly placed meet the EVAAS criteria or whether the thousands of kids who are not enrolled even though they meet the criteria are top scoring low income and minority kids, the lowest kids who meet the criteria, or certain schools not following the criteria. In an attempt to re-examine the data and answer these questions, E&R creates a report that has totally different numbers than Branch's report. They were supposed to be clarifying Branch's report. But they clarified numbers that looked nothing like the numbers Branch presented. And they seemed to not have even noticed that their numbers were totally different from Branch's.

E&R also combined the Algebra and Pre-Algebra numbers, to remove clarity. When asked to clarify what happened here, and get numbers that make sense, they still can't do it.

And somehow, they have lost the 6th grade placement. EVAAS provides predictions for 6th graders, but their placement criteria incorrectly says that EVAAS does not provide this. WCPSS tracks 6th grade. Kids in the top track are prepared for the rigor of Pre-algebra and that is the pre-algebra pool. But, they pretending like 6th grade is not a part of this placement problem. They just took it off the table. Kids who take standard math in 6th grade, then are placed in pre-algebra will be at a great disadvantage. They've confused the pre-algebra and algebra placement so much there seems to be no point in even asking why they are omitting the 6th grade information.

Given how E&R has handled something so simple as knowing who meets the qualifications compared to who is placed do you really think they could do a study of effectiveness that would make sense? All that is being asked for here is counts. What if the board were to ask for an effectiveness study to determine whether following this math placement criteria has been effective for the students who were not recommended by teachers but placed by EVAAS prediction, and whether the 70% cut is appropriate. They are light years away from being able to answer that. They have said they'll try to be able to report in January on what percent of the kids who meet their criteria are properly placed. They need another month and need SAS to help them.

How would any board get decent information on effectiveness from this E&R?

E&R's website does have a study on effectiveness of busing for the diversity policy. They say they selected a handful of schools where kids were bused for diversity. Examining the data, they found some kids were being bused from one high poverty school to another high poverty school, so including them would not be appropriate. (They didn't address why this would be. As always, when their studies find some outrageous thing they just treat it like no big deal and move on.) They threw other kids out of the study because they had selected to attend some other school. After they threw out everyone who didn't meet their criteria for the study, they had about 40 kids left or fewer and say this is too few kids to draw any conclusions about the effectiveness of the diversity policy. And then they were done with their job. They had finished their report. And it gets posted to their website and they move on to their next report.

This department is not capable of doing a meaningful study.

I am not aware of a widely accepted industry standard to measure effectiveness. Bill Gates apparently is spending millions to solve this problem. But, since policy 6200 has been in vogue for ages, surely there should be data, if not mountains of data, within WCPSS about the effectiveness of 'diversity', howsoever measured and presented.

You and I would be interested in comparing Plants A and B. WCPSS' though will constrain Plant A and gloss over Plant B's problems until Plant A's output has degraded. Along the way it will concoct measures of success that will win national accolades for quality and productivity.

I agree that this a lot of this would be hard to check, given our current E & R department.  If they can't get simple placement data (which after all is just merging two data bases that are already in the system), I can't imagine how they could gather information on who received Title 1 services.  My sister-in-law provides reading instruction at a Title 1 school  She not only knows which kids she serves, she also knows exactly which skills the kids are working on.  They move children into services when they discover that they are lacking a skill, monitor them to determine when they have mastered the skill, and then move them out when they have accomplished what is needed.  She cannot understand why any school would operate differently.  Funding is tight so it has to be used to help the children who need it.  (They are a rural system with a small tax base.)  I guess they must be using a school-wide approach since she can work with any child, ED or NED.  Even if the schools with a low level of F & R can only use the resources for the ED students, it still doesn't make sense to pull out students who don't need help.  (But then who says the system makes sense?)

I agree that their failure to plan ahead and have enough books for the students indicates that they were either not competent or not planning to comply with the change in placement criteria.  I think people don't realize how early this information is available.  I think it's correct to say that right now, with a few exceptions of students who may be on the margins, that we have a pretty good idea of how many students will qualify in 2011-2012.  I wonder if they are getting ready now?

The new supdt may elect to do some due diligence and level setting. It will be interesting to read about his/ her discoveries at WCPSS.