Tracking system for achievement is lauded

By Emily Richmond

Wednesday, July 29, 2009 | 2 a.m.

In 2004 the Clark County School District invested in a new approach to tracking student achievement and classroom instruction. It was supposed to help educators shape instruction around individual students’ strengths and weaknesses by regularly testing students and then measuring, with diagnostic software, how well they have grasped the material and identifying where they are falling short.

There was concern at the time, recalls School Board member Sheila Moulton, whether the Information Data Management System could live up to its billing. There were also worries that teachers might resent the structured format, that it would curtail innovation and require “teaching to the test.”

But five years later those fears have been largely unrealized. The district’s standardized test scores do indeed show gains, particularly in the lower grades. Although the overall scores weren’t high enough for the district to make adequate progress this year under the federal No Child Left Behind requirements, they still show marked improvement.

And educators say there’s hard evidence that the data tracking system has played a significant role in that progress.

This year 61 percent of the district’s third graders were proficient in math, compared with 44 percent in 2004. The gains are greater at the middle school level, where 66 percent of sixth graders were proficient on the latest round of standardized tests, compared with 50 percent in 2006. In seventh grade,

61 percent of students were proficient in math, compared with 49 percent in 2006.

Third grade reading proficiency jumped to 60 percent this year, from 43 percent in 2004. In seventh grade the improvement was greater, to 68 percent from 49 percent three years ago. Tenth graders also improved, but more modestly. Their math proficiency went to 46 percent from 41 percent in 2004, and reading proficiency was 78 percent, up from 75 percent.

All schools are required to give the benchmark assessments. But it’s up to individual principals and teachers to decide how they use the information.

In a survey of almost half of the district’s principals, 86 percent said their administrative teams used the tracking system to make instructional decisions.

The buy-in needs to be 100 percent, School Board President Terri Janison said.

“I’m all about empowerment and site-based decision making,” Janison said at a recent School Board meeting. “But on something like this, when our whole goal is student achievement … it’s absolutely unacceptable that every school and every principal aren’t doing this with their teachers.”

The backbone of the program is that teachers are told upfront what students need to know and are given immediate feedback on whether they are actually learning the required material. Teachers can then target their instruction accordingly.

Principals can also track which teachers are having the most success and what groups of students are falling behind.

That’s the struggle, said Sue Daellenbach, assistant superintendent for assessment and accountability. Her office regularly sends out support teams to work at schools on the finer points of the effort, including how to use the tracking system to create in-depth progress reports for parents, which is required at the elementary level.

At Fay Herron Elementary, the benchmark reports help teachers help each other, as well as individual students, Principal Kelly Sturdy said.

“We look forward to getting the results,” Sturdy said. “Suddenly we have multiple measures that help us diagnose what we need to do to help kids.”

However, a mandate requiring schools to lean more heavily on the tracking system won’t work, Sturdy said. If people aren’t eager to use it, then those benchmarks become “just one more test,” she said. “The results get tossed to the side and then it’s nothing more than wasted time.”

That’s the district’s next challenge: Persuade more principals and teachers — rather than force them — to get onboard.