Having dealt with the preplanning that goes into his Turnaround Solution (capitalized because that is the name of his consulting group), James Young now goes into what he calls the solution equation, part two of his book.
Right away, in chapter four's opening sentence, he reveals the niche he works in: "it is essential to know how a school's grade is calculated." What he offers is a rise in the grade to get a school released from the dreaded state of coming state sanctions.
It is clear from the detail he provides that he has done that in his previous assignments as a principal of a Duval County public school. It is not necessary to describe what he did--overall, the chapter relates how he analyzed FCAT data to understand how his schools were measured. Unfortunately, Florida has moved on from FCAT to the FSA (Florida Standards Assessments).
The game has changed. I checked the copyright date to see when the book was printed (2014), right around the time Florida changed tests and revised its grading formulas. Chapter 4 is out of date and needs to be rewritten. We must rely on Young to understand the nuances of the new system.
For example, learning gains is the hardest category now to produce results whereas before it was the easiest. No one has any idea of how a student is progressing to making learning gains by the FSA measurement, but two years of results have shown that the previous experience of schools scoring 70 or 80% learning gains when the passing rate hovered in the 30% range is over. Learning gains cannot be taken for granted. But no one knows how to predict them.
Wait, someone does. In my subject area, I have taken my school's results and correlated the raw scores (percent of questions answered correctly) to the scale scores used to assign a level (what we call the grade). I have determined the target scale score each of my students must produce to be credited with learning gains. Using interim assessments, I can predict how that student performance would equate to a scale score and whether the student is truly on track or not.
Why is this important? In my content area, mathematics, passing percent is one category, learning gains is another, and learning gains for the lowest 25% is another. Learning gains is two-thirds of the points produced by math. But no one knows how to predict them.
Given Young's description of how he drills into the data (another piece of school data jargon) to identify which students to focus on, it is imperative that he knows how to do this.
Another nuance: no one knows who the bottom quartile is. Unlike FCAT, when last year's test was used to identify these students and schools could work with the students for improvement, the FSA determines the bottom quartile from the current test. The state looks at the lowest scores and then determines if they made learning gains from the current test.
Young makes an important point that a school must recalculate its data at the beginning of the year because the student body from last year is different from this year. He takes the test results of the students currently enrolled and recalculates the school grade. That gives him the true point from which the school is beginning and to set the improvement targets needed for the desired school grade.
But when he talks about setting targets, it gets uncomfortable for teachers. Not only does he set overall targets like we need nine more students for a category, but he breaks that down to each individual teacher and asks them to identify the particular students who are most likely to reach the mark and to concentrate on them.
Many principals have done this across the years: asking teachers to perform triage and ignore those who will pass/make gains on their own and those who are so far behind they cannot improve enough to help the school grade.
When this happens, the focus of the school centers on the institution, not the children it serves.
I understand that the school board has brought James Young into designated schools because a state of emergency exists in the three schools that might be forced to close this year and five more the year after.
It is about survival and sometimes some are sacrificed for the good of the whole.
But school is about providing opportunity to every child, every day, every school, every classroom. Sound familiar?
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