LM Feb 2024

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Can you share what your district’s IAR scores are and get into how your district communicates that local assessments are more valuable to your community? There’s a large discrepancy. When we look at our performance in the IAR, it shows 32 percent in reading and 21 percent in math. Not great. At the same time, closing achievement gaps from a pandemic needs to be considered there. Schiller Park is a place that really values and believes in the importance of students meeting their growth targets over time so that, ultimately, we can get them to grade level. Our board and our community understands that. We present this information annually at a public board meeting, and I’m very open with the community about our feelings on MAP versus IAR and how it relates to what we should be evaluated on as a district, and the work that we’re doing with our students. In my professional opinion, we want to make sure that our students are moving at a steady pace toward their growth targets and, ultimately, getting them to grade level. If I’m being honest, we don’t spend a lot of time with the IAR data that comes to us after the school year has ended. It’s a one and done test that happens on one day in the spring of a school year. The information isn’t helpful to me by the time I get it back. In contrast, I administer the MAP assessment in the fall, winter and spring and I get the data in real time, and I’m able to respond to that data as an educator and adjust my instruction based on the needs of students. I think that is extremely valuable. What are classroom sizes and staffing like at Schiller Park? I would say our class sizes are fairly low. In K–5, we’re at a ratio of 16 to 20 students per teacher and our middle school is about 23 to 25 students per teacher. I really think that makes a big difference, especially with our young learners. I want to get more into the secret sauce of what’s working well in Schiller Park. In the White Paper NWEA produced, they delved into instructional strategies learned from high growth schools. One of the things in that report was teaching grade level instruction versus

Can you share your district’s academic journey and what put you on the radar of NWEA? My first year as superintendent was in the 2011-12 school year. At that time there was no doubt that we had some work to do in the area of leveraging data. As a principal, I knew data was important, but I also didn’t feel as though we were capitalizing on what we were doing with the information once we got it. I made that a big priority as superintendent. I started meeting with my building leaders after each testing period to analyze their data at the school level and basically modeled for them what those conversations should look like with their teachers. That got us talking about the data and looking much more closely at where our students are meeting their growth targets and, if not, why not? Then we examined what it is that we should be doing differently to help them reach academic goals. Now, we test our students three times a year, and we are using that data to inform our instruction. Let’s get into the data. Can you share details on the academic growth your district has achieved? I’ll take it back to the 2012–13 school year, which is what we use as baseline here. If we look back at the 2012–13 school year, we had 63 percent of our students meeting their target in reading and 58 percent of them meeting their target in math. NWEA would tell you that if you are in the 50th percentile of students meeting their target growth, that is generally what they see across the nation. For us, we just really wanted to do better than that. Now, our most recent data from the 2022–23 school year, we had 75 percent of our students meet their targets in reading and 79 percent of our students meet their targets in math. I understand there’s an argument to be made that’s not a grade level assessment and how are your kids doing on the IAR and how does that compare to their performance on that. I cannot stress enough that closing the achievement gaps, and getting students at grade level, has to come before expecting high performance on a grade level assessment. At that time, a group of schools were subset labeled high growth schools. I believe 789 schools were given that label. You know, no one talked to us about that when that first happened. It wasn’t until right before the pandemic they reached out to us and said your district is standing out and that they would like to do a research study on District 81.

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5 LM February 2024 continued...