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Project aims at gauging students' growth from August to May, effectiveness of teachers

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, July 15, 2011 - For years, educators have used standardized test scores to show what students knew on the day they took the exam.

Now, Missouri is working on a pilot project designed to show what students have learned from the day classes begin to the day the school year is over -- then use that information to improve learning for all students in the state.

Sharon Schattgen, an educational researcher at the University of Missouri at Columbia, is helping develop the growth plan. She said the plan will provide a valuable tool to help measure the effectiveness of teachers as well as how much students learn in any particular grade.

In doing so, she added, it will also strengthen the way the state and individual school districts measure what has become a watchword for those who want to determine just how well schools are performing -- accountability.

"For years," Schattgen said, "educators have said to me, is it appropriate for accountability systems to hold us responsible for meeting particular targets? What is most important is how far we take our students from the time at which they come to us, during the time we have them, until the time they leave us. It is that growth that is the best way to gauge whether we have done our job. Now, we're able to measure that growth, which is what I think educators have been asking for for a lot of years now.

"As long as we've had the types of accountability systems that are in place at both the state and federal level, we've looked at successive groups of students over time. I think educators acknowledge that that way of holding professionals accountable is appropriate, but it may not be the best way to hold professionals accountable. Growth measures take into account where kids started in a classroom or in a building or in a district and where they end up. I don't think it necessarily levels the playing field, but it does take into account that starting point in relation to the ending point."

Using scores from the MAP tests that Missouri students take in various subjects in various grades, the pilot project will help track their performance over time. Schattgen said the growth measures shouldn't be used as the only way to judge how effective a teacher is -- but they will provide one more source of information, and an important one that has been missing.

And once the pilot project is complete and the measurement is used by school districts and charter schools statewide, parents and others interested in education will be able to see how well the system is performing.

"We have never been in the position to look at individual student growth until now," Schattgen said. "They're going to know how effectively our educational system is moving students up the MAP score scale, from one year to the next."

Similar Data, New Analysis

The pilot project grew out of meetings sponsored by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education in the spring of 2010. Educators, parents and others interested in Missouri schools were invited to take part in a series of meetings that led to the start of the pilot earlier this year. In all, 146 districts from throughout the state and 11 charters from St. Louis and Kansas City signed up to take part.

Officials had hoped to release the first numbers to districts this past spring, but the amount of data proved to be too great to get that done; now district-level results are set to go to administrators in mid-August, with numbers at the building level scheduled to be sent out a month later. Then, districts will release data on individual students to their parents or guardians.

If a district or charter chooses to make public the numbers from the pilot project, it may do so, but Schattgen emphasized that the decision is theirs.

"This is first and foremost a learning opportunity," she said, "and no stakes are attached to these data. We are just trying to better understand them. We want to do that in a way that allows freedom for conversation, not some sort of external set of consequences. So the data we release to districts and at the building level we are releasing only to those particular entities. What they choose to do with them is up to them, during the pilot."

She stressed that while each Missouri student is assigned a confidential identifier number, individual student data would not be made public.

The numbers will come from the MAP tests in communications arts and mathematics given to students in grades three through eight. Information about the process will be made available to all interested parties, not just those involved in the pilot project.

To make sure that a wide spectrum of those involved in education would have a say in how the project proceeded, several professional groups were recruited to join, including those representing teachers, administrators, school boards and parents, as well as representatives from the Missouri legislature and the governor's office. Schattgen also noted that Missouri would be able to benefit from the experience of states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado, Florida and others that have been working with growth data for a while.

Because teachers in particular might be affected by what the growth figures show, Chris Guinther, the president of theMissouri National Education Association, was eager to make sure her group's point of view was represented.

"We always say that if you're not at the table, you're on the menu," she said, "so we absolutely want to be part of the discussion."

Apples to Apples

Guinther and others whose jobs could be shaped by the project's results recognize that in the current climate surrounding education, the numbers may not always be pretty but they will be necessary.

"We want to be accountable," she said. "We want evaluation systems of both teachers and students to be high quality. We know this is what is coming down the road, tying test scores not only to teacher evaluations but to teacher pay. We know that it has to be done correctly and collaboratively, and we have to be involved in the decisions."

The big advantage, said Vicki VanLaere, an assistant superintendent in the Mehlville School District, is that not only will the pilot project be able to compare a student entering a particular grade to that same student at the end of the year, but it will also be able to compare the growth from that one year to the growth the following year.

The way things are now she pointed out, MAP data compare scores earned by one group of third graders to the scores earned by the students in third grade the year before -- a comparison that isn't always meaningful, given the large disparities that can occur from one group of students to the next.

"That's apples to oranges," she said. "We need apples to apples."

As a result, VanLaere added, the growth numbers will be useful not only to educators but to parents and others in the community as well.

"I think they're actually going to be able to tell children's progress from one year to another," she said. "Right now, they are looking at two different things. They can see maybe that the kid has gotten a higher number on the test, and that is meaningful, but it would be more meaningful to be able to drill down and see where that growth has occurred."

Chris Raeker, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction at the Kirkwood School District, said her district is involved in the pilot project to make sure the numbers will enable each student to be viewed as an individual, as opposed to measuring everyone against a single benchmark. Measuring growth from the start of the year to the end helps to account for differences that students bring to the classroom from the outside, she said.

"We want to be careful that we don't hold all kids to the same high standards," she said. "We have high expectations for all our kids, and we want to help them get there."

How Will Public React?

One worry that many involved in the project have is the possible public backlash to the publication of growth scores of students tied to individual teachers.

Last August, the Los Angeles Times published those numbers for hundreds of schools and thousands of teachers and students in its area -- and the reaction wasn't always pretty.

Even though the newspaper gave teachers the opportunity to comment on the results, the project prompted a lot of discussion, much of it negative. While some think that growth numbers may help teachers work together more collaboratively, to try to figure out what may be going wrong when scores go down, others worry that it may set up competitive situations that would ultimately be a drag on learning.

Schattgen -- who stressed that she was commenting as an educational researcher, not a policymaker with the Missouri department of education -- said she did not agree with the newspaper's decision to publish the teacher-level growth data. Neither did VanLaere in Mehlville.

"I don't like to see them used for merit pay," she said of the growth numbers, "and I didn't like it for publication. It's bad enough that we get our salaries published. I don't think that it would be fair, and I don't think it's going to be equitable. There might be validity to it, but I don't think it would motivate teachers to do a better job. I would hate to see them slapped down like what happened in California."

Guinther, at the Missouri NEA, worries that growth numbers, just like the test scores for particular grades in any one year, might be too easily misinterpreted, in a negative way.

"Our concern is that if those test scores start being published," she said, "they won't show the whole picture -- the support that is there, the professional development that has gone on, graduate rates, drop out rates, the number of students on free and reduced lunch. There are too many variables to believe that test scores are the be-all and the end-all.

"If it's done right, it leads to collaboration. That's why the teachers' voice needs to be at the table as these kinds of systems are being developed. But it can't be competitive. It's not going to be what's best for the kids if it's competitive."

Dale Singer began his career in professional journalism in 1969 by talking his way into a summer vacation replacement job at the now-defunct United Press International bureau in St. Louis; he later joined UPI full-time in 1972. Eight years later, he moved to the Post-Dispatch, where for the next 28-plus years he was a business reporter and editor, a Metro reporter specializing in education, assistant editor of the Editorial Page for 10 years and finally news editor of the newspaper's website. In September of 2008, he joined the staff of the Beacon, where he reported primarily on education. In addition to practicing journalism, Dale has been an adjunct professor at University College at Washington U. He and his wife live in west St. Louis County with their spoiled Bichon, Teddy. They have two adult daughters, who have followed them into the word business as a communications manager and a website editor, and three grandchildren. Dale reported for St. Louis Public Radio from 2013 to 2016.