Leadership Matters August 2013 issue.pub

(Continued from page 13) ISBE unveils growth metric value tables——————————

a step closer to real data at the state level that we can use to make sound educational decisions for our students as they progress from year to year and hopefully better informed decisions regarding the overall performance of our schools.” In addition to Webb, other superintendents on the panel included Dr. Thomas Leonard of Barrington and Brad Hutchison, who recently retired as Superintendent of Olympia District 16 after a distinguished career of more than 30 years in public education. O’Brian said the range of points (0-200) and the values assigned to maintaining, progressing or regressing in the eight categories were determined collaboratively with the stakeholders on the panel. Another factor that comes into play especially for the coming school year is the elevation of the bar for the ISAT test administered to students in grades 3-8. The “meets” bar has been raised significantly and, applying the new performance levels to last year’s scores, could result in up to 25 percent more students failing to meet standards statewide. That -- and the fact that so many schools and districts nationwide are failing to meet the unrealistic AYP standards of NCLB (only 17.7 percent of Illinois districts met AYP in 2012) -- is precisely the reason for implementation of the Value Table as a Growth Metric in Illinois. “The Value Table was chosen as Illinois’ growth metric because of the relative transparency of this metric,” O’Brian said. “It provides another measure of the effectiveness of school and district programs and adds to the AYP picture in a way in which schools and districts can show growth.”

The vertical axis is the performance in Year 1 and the horizontal axis is the Year 2 performance. The intersection represents the points awarded for growth. A school’s or district’s growth is computed by taking the total number of students’ growth points and dividing them by the number of students. For this year, the Year 1 axis will represent new performance levels applied to last year’s scores. The concept and the final points in the Value Table are the result of meetings with an advisory panel that included ISBE personnel, statisticians and representatives from stakeholder groups such as IASA, the Illinois Principals Association (IPA), the Regional Offices of Education (ROE), the Illinois Education Association (IEA), the Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT), and Illinois universities. “The first meeting was kind of contentious,” said Dr. Steve Webb, Superintendent of Goreville Community Unit District 1 and President of IASA. “There were lots of positive comments about the direction ISBE was attempting to go, but very little agreement among practitioners and statisticians. Concerns were raised about things like the effects of small class size and the issue of fairly representing the growth of high-performing students and districts.” Webb said the meeting had to be continued to another date of which he was unable to attend, but said the proposed Value Table that ISBE and the panel came up with seems to have addressed those concerns. “We identified the need for individual progression data decades ago and although there are many other factors that our schools use to gauge progress than just the ISAT, it appears we are finally going to move

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