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Date: 6/1/2021
NORTHAMPTON – During the Northampton School Committee’s May 27 meeting, the committee received a presentation about the district’s mid-year screening results based on fall and winter data.
Before jumping into the mid-year screening presentation Superintendent John Provost explained why the district was still requiring masks at recess.
“Permitting unmasked, undistanced contact conflicts with the current CDC guidelines, as does the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education recommendation to not quarantine individuals who come in contact with positive persons at recess. Our Health Department follows the CDC guidelines and would require a quarantine. Unmasked recess could easily result in quarantining many students and a substantial disruption to school operations,” he said.
For the mid-year screening presentation, Provost explained the data was gathered from tests administered in the fall and winter semesters of similar difficulty to determine growth.
“This is a form of assessment known as Progress Monitoring. With the Progress Monitoring system, you want to have multiple versions of an assessment of equivalent difficulty. The questions do not get harder, what you would like to see students answer more of them accurately and that is the real indication of growth,” he said.
Overall, Provost said one of the biggest takeaways from the data is that his goal is to investigate how to accelerate students to catch them up to where they need to be.
“Based on our data I consider it a misnomer to speak of learning loss, we do not actually see much evidence of learning loss, students developed skills this year, just not as quickly as you would expect. It would be more accurate to speak of a learning lag. The instructional challenge for us is how to accelerate student growth protectories to get them back on track,” he said.
Provost said one of the biggest areas of concern for math was a decrease in progress for sixth grade students.
“We saw some problems with math in sixth grade, and this reflects a historical pattern we have seen on other assessments for sixth graders in many years past. This is a group we had real regression, they started out at the national average and ended up far below,” he said.
If those numbers continue to fall in the spring semester, Provost said the district would look at direct ways to find a solution.
“Between fall and winter, the students considered to be at risk for learning problems in math in sixth grade increased from 32 percent to 40 percent. If this pattern continues into the spring, this will be something that warrants a special focus for the school and district next year,” he said.
For reading, Provost said the biggest concern area was in K-2.
“A larger proportion of the students are at risk for developing early literacy learning problems than we normally would like to see. Literacy development was negatively affected in the early grades, especially in grade K to 2, this is consistent with national data on the performance impacts of pandemic school closures,” he said.
In the data, white students were denoted as a red line on the graph while Hispanic and Latino students were denoted by a blue line and in most cases the red line was a higher percentile than the blue line, which Provost said was a direct result of problems with equity for student achievement.
“We have problems with equity of instructional opportunity and outcome that we are providing in the district. I think the real challenge here is to increase racial equity in our student achievement,” he said.
Committee member Susan Voss said the district should continue to focus on equity more than it already does.
“I think we need to really think about ways to close that gap by bringing the lower performing group up to the red group and not stagnating the red group because I think we do that a lot. Our solution has been to wait around for everybody to catch up and I think that is wrong. I think the key is to figure out how to catch them up earlier,” she said.
The School Committee next meets on June 10.