Superintendent's Corner: AYP, Focus Schools and Accountability

The Michigan Department of Education (MDE) released its school report cards last week, which includes the list of schools meeting state standards through . And among the Royal Oak schools the MDE says need improvement are l and .

Both are listed as "focus schools" - a new designation from the state - meaning they have large achievement gaps between the top 30 percent of students and the bottom 30 percent.

Here Superintendent Shawn Lewis-Lakin answers frequently asked questions about the more stringent requirements for a school district to pass AYP:

Question:   What does the Focus School label that the state has applied to Royal Oak Middle School and Addams Elementary School mean?
Answer:  The Focus Schools label is new. The state began to share information about it this past Wednesday. The Focus School designation is not about the level of achievement for students in a school.  Rather, it is about the gap between the top 30% of scores and the bottom 30 percent of scores on state tests.   

Question:  What data did the state use in deciding which schools to label?
Answer:  The scores used to generate the labels are from state tests administered in October 2011 to measure learning from the 2010-2011 school year. These labels are not based on current measures of recent learning.  

Question:  If you get labeled a focus school for having too large a gap between the highest achieving and lowest achieving students in a school, is the answer teaching to the middle?
Answer:  We will NOT do this. We will not lower our high standards. We will look at how we deliver instruction and support learning to be sure that ALL students perform to the very best of their abilities.  

Question: How will the district respond to these schools being labeled as Focus Schools?
Answer:  We are going to use the focus school designation to focus our attention on the gap between the top 30% of scores and bottom 30% of scores on state tests. We will be looking at more recent data to see if similar patterns are present. We will be exploring why the gap the state found is present.   Is it the result of the diversity of students served by the school?  Are there instructional and curriculum factors contributing to the gap?  We will look at how we deliver instruction and support learning to be sure that ALL students perform to the very best of their abilities.   We have been doing this, and this new designation will provide motivation for increasing our efforts.   

Question: In other districts there is a lot of talk about new mandates associated with a school being designated a Focus School. Do those apply to Royal Oak?
Answer:  Non-Title I schools (Addams and ROMS are non-Title I Schools) are not subject to sanctions nor any of the state mandates associated with the label.   The mandates are NOT applicable in Royal Oak.

Question:  There was a headline last Thursday about the District not making AYP. Can you explain what this means?
Answer:  There are over 60 factors that determine whether a school district makes AYP or not.   It is binary system, in which a failure to meet standards in one out of sixty factors can result in a not meeting AYP designation.  Our failure to make AYP is based on just one of those 60 factors.  

Question:  There seems to be many high performing districts that did not make AYP.  Why is this?
Answer:  When a school has a defined subgroup of over 30 students, each subgroup must meet the same standards as the school overall.  There are many smaller school districts that are not as high achieving as Royal Oak that make AYP simply because they do not have subgroups with thirty students in them. There are many high achieving districts - for example, Ann Arbor, Novi, and Troy - that are in the same situation as Royal Oak.  Like us, they are categorized as not making AYP based on the performance of a single subgroup within the district. It is critically important to understand how these designations are determined and to view them in the appropriate context.

Question:  Can you provide an example of how a factor associated with a single subgroup can impact the AYP designation?
Answer:    At Royal Oak High School we had a subgroup with 32 students in it that had 31 students from within the subgroup take the test, which is a 97% rate of assessment.  We reported an irregularity in how one student tested, and because we made this report the student was classified by the state as not having tested.  This resulted in a state count of 30 of 32 students assessed, for a percent assessed of 94%.    If the participation rate in a state assessment for any subgroup is less than 95%, a school or district is labeled as not making AYP.   

Question:  Some people may read this and accuse you of making excuses.   How do you respond?
Answer:  Our core mission is student learning.  We take the data from all assessments of learning seriously. Meaningful accountability is based on a full spectrum of measures for student learning. Multiple measures must be considered.   Moreover, the metrics need to be current, accurate, and reliable. As a district, we need to be accountable for student learning.   As the leader of the district, I need to be accountable for student learning.   I welcome such accountability.     
Accountability involves understanding the data and how any given label associated with the data may or may not be helpful. We are committed to improving learning for all of our students and are actively engaged in efforts to do so.