Wednesday, October 16, 2024
GREEN BAY – During its Oct. 14 work session, the Green Bay Area Public Schools (GBAPS) Board of Education received a School Accountability Update and Early Progress report from GBAPS Associate Superintendent of Continuous Improvement David Johns.
Johns said that while the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) had released some data regarding district report cards to the press recently, the information that the district received was much more in-depth and is embargoed for the time being.
“Which means that I'm going to be able to refer to some generalities today, but not actually present you specific numbers. It'll be that the next time the board comes together for a work session is almost exactly when the state is expecting to release all of the data. And so I wanted to use this as an opportunity prior to that, to talk a little bit about what we can expect to see,” Johns said.
Johns said that the district is looked at as one “giant school” and that it takes all of the factors into consideration — achievement, growth, priority performance and on track to graduation — together as one composite.
“Some trends that you can expect to see as our report card public over the next month is that our composite score as a district has increased to the highest point in the last four years, and so that's a COVID-forward measurement with our composite score, which again represents those four categories,” Johns explained.
“More of our schools have moved into the Exceeds Expectation zones, and fewer of our schools are in the lowest performance band, which is Fails to Meet Expectations.
“Some of the factors that we attribute this to, because remember, this is the story of last school year. This is the time of year when DPI report cards kind of come back into conversation, but always remembering, it's the story of last year's performance.
“Some of the factors that those are attributed to. You know, there's a really large scope that we can examine: First of all, a stronger emphasis on continuous-improvement processes, more individuals at the school level involved in continuous-improvement processes — these are the annual goals that schools set — and then the short-cycle intervals — about 100 days — that schools revisit that goal and revisit their practices, an overall goal orientation with a focus on equity, we've taken efforts to expand data literacy and assessment literacy. Those really go hand-in-hand. What is this tool I'm using and what is the information that could provide me and what should I do with what I learned from it?
“We did expand the pilot of the literacy materials along with the Lexia platform, starting in the winter of last year. So we did have some schools that had a few months using the materials before the state assessment series kicked in as well.
“So not a scientific correlation by any means, but just wanted to share with you some high-level efforts that I can tell you give us more confidence as we move forward. Everything I named is common to where we are right now in our work.”
The preliminary secure versions of the report cards were released on Oct. 3.
The final public release is expected no later than Nov. 30.
