(Vol. 4, No. 1 - Spring 2000)

"Are the Things We're Doing
Working for Our Students?"


The Kentucky Association of School Councils provides in-depth training that can help schools delve more deeply into the results of the Kentucky Core Content Tests. During a session at Iroquois Middle School, teachers and parents uncover some difficult questions about student performance.


By Holly Holland

Marty Vowels is a seasoned school administrator who spent several years crisscrossing the country as a consultant helping other educators adopt better professional practices.

But as she wraps up her first year as principal of Iroquois Middle School, she's still wrestling with some of the problems she once coached her colleagues to solve. Specifically, she's trying to figure out how to motivate teachers to make significant changes in their instruction -- and to use student achievement data to guide their way.

"How do you not kill people's morale while at the same time creating an inspiration that you need to do much better than you are?" Vowels asks. "I've been struggling with that all year. Because you don't want people to think they're not doing anything right. But you also don't want them to get to the point where they say, 'Oh, it's because the (state) test is bad. Oh, it's because our kids are poor. Oh, it's because the elementary schools aren't preparing them well.'

"You have to take all that stuff away and get a group of staff members, the larger the better, who say, 'We know that we can do better, and what are the things that we need to work on to make that happen?'"

Statistics suggest that Iroquois still has much work to do. Students' test scores are among the lowest in Jefferson County, and Iroquois also fares poorly when compared with schools serving similar populations (see the "Band" story and chart on page 13).

During this past school year, Vowels has been encouraging her staff to ask hard questions about why they choose certain instructional strategies and whether those methods have produced the results they expected. Several times teachers have met to analyze the school's performance on Kentucky's achievement tests, including a March session conducted by Susan Weston, executive director of the Kentucky Association of School Councils (KASC).

Colorful data for visual learners

About a dozen Iroquois teachers and parents gathered after school on a day where unseasonably warm weather made it even more difficult than usual to muster enthusiasm for number crunching. For two hours, the group reviewed the test results as presented through a series of visually appealing bar graphs and pie charts created by the KASC. The color-coded, computerized graphs and charts don't make the statistics any less startling, but they can help people notice patterns and ask good follow-up questions.

"I'm a visual learner. Show me a pie chart, show me a bar graph, I understand it," said Ruth Fister, an eighth-grade science teacher at Iroquois who said the data analysis session gave her new insights into the school's academic performance.

The KASC developed the assessment profiles specifically to help school councils do a better job of interpreting and responding to their test results. The KASC also has used the profiles to train hundreds of Kentuckians who are participating in the Commonwealth Institute for Parent Leadership, a multi-year project of the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence, which helps parents become better advocates for public education.

The KASC's school profiles show the percentage of students who scored in the novice, apprentice, proficient, and distinguished categories in each subject, and the types of skills students mastered or failed to learn. The graphs break down test scores by race, gender, family income, and program placement, such as gifted and talented classes; reveal year-to-year trends in achievement. They also summarize surveys students complete about the kind of instruction they receive and the range of topics they cover in class.

"I would never jump to the conclusion that something is absolutely not happening in a school based on a survey alone, but it's a really good clue for going up and asking questions and getting it checked out," Weston said. "What you do is get more parents who are comfortable with the data who are prepared to go to schools and ask the questions. The schools have to get a little bit better at either answering the questions or finding out enough information for themselves so they can start looking at the data."

Asking pertinent questions about performance gaps

Using study sheets prepared by the KASC, people learn to ask pertinent questions. For example, if girls outperform boys in most subjects, what is the school doing to close the gap? If a school has low scores in the economics section of the social studies test, how do teachers plan to blend more economics lessons into the curriculum or get additional training in the subject? If low-performing students say that they use worksheets every day in science class, will the school ensure that they have more opportunities to apply basic skills through experiments, projects, and field trips?

During the Iroquois session, a group of teachers reviewing the math results wondered if greater attention to reading would help the two percent of students who didn't answer any of the math questions. A group studying the social studies results suggested that with a little extra effort the 35 percent of students who scored in the "high novice" category might reach the apprentice category. One teacher noticed that the school's African-American students fared so poorly that their scores were lower than most of the students with learning disabilities.

"I would say it's scary, but you also could say, 'Hooray, we've done well with our disabled students,'" Weston said. "The racial breakdowns are painful. We need to be uncomfortable about it."

Others wondered why so few of the school's top students failed to reach the proficient and distinguished categories in any subjects.

"We have some very smart children here," one teacher said. "I see no reason why we don't have more children at the top."

Helping the students that you do have

Several teachers groused about the unfairness of the state test and the way neighborhood schools such as Iroquois lose many motivated and high-performing students to the district's magnet schools. But as the afternoon wore on, the teachers began talking less about the students they don't have in their classrooms and more about how to help the ones they do have.

"Go back and look at your consolidated planning," Weston suggested, "Ask, 'Are the things we thought were going to work delivering or not? And are the things we started last spring the right things?' It's important to look at this and try to find some connections."

Weston also suggested that the staff consult and visit schools around the state that have had more success with similar student populations. Vowels agreed that targeted professional development is key to the turnaround at Iroquois.

"I see some really good teaching, and I see some mediocre teaching, and I see some really poor teaching," Vowels said. "And it's the same with the kids and their test scores -- How do you get the poor ones closer to the top?"

[To find out more about the KASC data analysis process, including how to arrange for a study session in your school, contact the Council at (606) 238-2188 or send e-mail to kascouncil@aol.com]


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