Questions Your Eastern Carver County School Board Candidate Should Be Able to Answer, #1

Sean Olsen
Sep 7, 2018 · 3 min read

How should we judge if personalized learning and standards-based learning/grading is working?

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a whole lot of effort being put into the rollout of personalized learning and standards-based leaning and grading across the Eastern Carver County School District. If you’re a parent or a student or a teacher or an administrator in the district, you’ve found yourself right in the middle of all of the action.

But the question becomes: is this all sound and fury, signifying nothing? How do we judge the results of all of this effort to make sure that it’s achieving what we think it’s supposed to achieve?

One way to evaluate how a school district is performing is to look at results on standardized test scores. Those results over the last few years have not been — generally speaking — on a good trend line for our district.

(It’s here that I will offer the usual caveats about standardized testing. Standardized testing is not the be-all, end-all of evaluating student performance — particularly when evaluating an individual student in an individual subject. What it is most useful for is the purpose for which I’m going to use it for here: baselining performance across large numbers of students. All data used in this post can be found using the Minnesota Report Card feature of the Minnesota Department of Education’s website.)

Across all students, Eastern Carver County Schools continue to produce district-wide numbers that outpace statewide averages. Let’s be clear about that — but there are worrying signs in the numbers among certain populations and about how we are trending compared to statewide averages.

As you can see from the above graphic, across all students who took MCA math exams last spring, 5.6% more of Eastern Carver County School students earned a score that meets or exceeds grade level than the statewide average. However, three significant student populations — children receiving free or reduced lunch, Hispanic and Latino students, and English Learner students all under-performed the statewide averages. Meanwhile, the gap between ECCS and the statewide averages declined across nearly every group.

In reading, the story is similar. District-wide averages continue to run ahead of statewide numbers, but the gap is narrowing. (And, no, the change in gaps between our district and the statewide averages is not solely the product of improved statewide performance. In math, ECCS all student performance dropped 2.9% versus a 2.4% decline statewide. In reading, ECCS all student performance dropped 1.6% versus a 0.1% improvement statewide.)

As stated above, this is just one measure of student achievement and not a complete picture of everything that happens in a classroom. But it’s also a useful checkpoint for seeing how we stack up against other districts.

The question to ask your school board candidate is how will they judge if the personalized learning/standards-based learning and grading is working? How do they respond to the trends shown above? What are the outcomes they expect to receive and how will they measure that performance? If they can’t give you a coherent answer to that question, be wary.

Sean Olsen

Written by

Proud dad of Lauren, Abby and Ryan. Husband to Angie. Member of Chaska Park Board and Dist 112 E-12 Facilities Taskforce. RT does not = endorsement.

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