YSD Leaves Behind NCLB Law

School District Looks Ahead, Prepares For New Education Standards

By Andrew Atwal
andrew.atwal@yankton.net

Officials in the Yankton School District (YSD) are looking forward to moving away from No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and towards the new Common Core standards, already adopted by many other states.

The new standards allow schools to show themselves as being successful if they demonstrate growth and students’ test scores show improvement over time.

Kathy Wagner, director of student services at YSD, said that even with the new standards, teachers and officials in the district want to continue improving scores with students with disabilities and maintain the scores with other subgroups.

“This school year will be the first year with the new model,” Wagner said. “Last September, officials started to develop the new accountability model at the state level.”

She added that last year’s test scores were based on NCLB, while next spring’s test scores will be with the Common Core model.

The new model will also only count students one time. The NCLB model could have students counted more than once if they fell into multiple subgroups.

All of the changes will be in place in 2014-15.

With the new standards, the state will publish a list of schools assigned into one of three categories:

• A priority school will fall into the bottom 5 percent of schools in the state, and the state will try to help the school improve a great deal.

• A focus school will fall into the middle of the pack, with the state helping the school.

• A reward school will be where a majority of the schools are supposed to fall into, and is the highest rating a school can achieve.

The new guidelines will hold schools accountable based on achievement, academic growth, attendance, or college or career readiness, effective teachers and principals, and school climate.

“In order for the state to get their waiver approved by the feds, they needed to include all five of those categories,” Wagner said. “The state is still in a committee in order to determine how they will score some of the categories, including school climate.”

Districts across South Dakota will have two years to get the standards fully implemented, which are based on a 100-point scale, with each factor getting its own point rating.

“We are in a wait-and-see mode to see how all the indicators will be developed and assessed,” Wagner added.

She said that state officials are considering using the Charlotte Danielson model as a tool for evaluating teachers. However, the Danielson model was never intended to be an evaluation tool; it was to be used as a way to make teachers more effective, but in a non-threatening, non-evaluation way. So the South Dakota Education Association is fighting against using the Danielson model as the framework for teacher evaluations.

“Most districts across the state think they should be able to assess teachers the way they want, and not have it be a statewide standard,” Wagner said. “At YSD, we have some of the most rigorous standards for evaluating our teachers. They are very comprehensive standards that we have set out for our teacher     evaluations.”

YSD Superintendent Dr. Joe Gertsema dded: “We don’t believe we need help from the state or federal government when evaluating our teachers. We believe our evaluating system is working.”

Some of the ways that officials in YSD evaluate teachers include going through pages of criteria for teacher standards, along with doing observations of teachers throughout the year.

Next spring’s test scores will serve as the baseline level scores for YSD.

As part of the college and career readiness indicator, ACT scores will be used to assess how ready a student is for a job or for a college education. However, Wagner notes that not all students take the ACT, so another test will have to be offered to students free of charge to help determine if a student is college or career ready.

“You can’t force someone to pay for a test that they’re using at the state level,” Wagner said.

The new standards will also have a gap group that is an aggregate count of student groups in the state that have historically experienced achievement gaps — basically, students that need some extra help. This group will include African-American, Native American, Hispanic, economically disadvantaged, students with disabilities, migrant and limited English proficient students. The non-gap group will consist of the rest of the subgroups.

South Dakota Department of Education Secretary Dr. Melody Schopp said in a statement that the gap group concept serves the state well for several different reasons. First, by aggregating the count of students within the subgroups, more schools can focus on the students that are struggling or are in the gap group. In addition, by using the gap and non-gap group for accountability purposes, it ensures that each student counts only one time when considering student achievement.

Under NCLB, a student could fall into a number of subgroups (for example, economically disadvantaged, a student with disabilities and limited English proficient — this would have counted the student three times). Under this system, a student is only counted once.

Taking on a new system will demand some preparation, Gertsema said.

“Every time you undergo a mandatory change from the state or federal government, there will be an expense there for training,” he said. “There is a lot of new training           involved.”

“Holding schools accountable for their test results isn’t a bad thing,” Wagner said.

You can follow Andrew Atwal on Twitter at twitter.com/andrewatwal

 

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