More Students Becoming Proficient!

During this school year we have been feverishly working to move more students to become solidly proficient. The results of our school-wide efforts are showing positive results.

On the second Reading Lions assessment, school-wide we increased the percentage of students who scored proficient by over 10%. Our goal is 15%, so we are making progress towards meeting our goal. A second part of that goal is a 20% increase of our English Learners into proficiency. We did a little better on that goal, moving 12% more students into proficiency than on the same assessment last year.

While any growth is a good we still have a long way to go before we can celebrate. Even our grades that have the best results (4th Grade) only have 43% of the students passing the assessment. We can celebrate growth, but not having over half of the students failing our school-wide assessments!

Unfortunately, Emerson's results are about average in the school district. We know that our teachers and children are smart. We know that they are all working hard. The biggest obstacle that we need to overcome in meeting California competency standards is to even further align what we teach to what is tested. As a school and a district we have been in this process for a while. We rely too much on our adopted textbooks to provide that alignment, but unfortunately the texts are not aligned closely enough to move more students into proficiency.

The process that we are using is to identify the most important standards and to plan our instruction to match those standards. Sounds easy? When teams of teachers plan for all of the different strands of each subject every day it can take a huge amount of planning.

Planning time is one of our biggest barriers. Many schools have "early release days" when students are dismissed at about 12:30 every Thursday. As a school we don't have "early release days" but instead teachers are released to plan when noon supervisors and substitute teachers supervise the students while doing independent work.

Steven Covey stated that "Every organization is perfectly aligned for the results that it gets." So, if we want to increase the number of students who are successful academically, we need to keep thinking about the next steps we need to take to increase student success.