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GCHS part of pilot assessment program
Published 10/14/2008 in News : Education
By EMILY BEHLMANN
Though Garden City High School's failure to meet Kansas State Assessment targets two years in a row ordinarily would affect the school's accreditation status, GCHS remains fully accredited this year thanks to a recent decision by the Kansas State Board of Education, said Steve Nordby, assessment coordinator for USD 457.
Nordby told the Garden City Board of Education Monday night that GCHS benefitted from the state's new "expected gains formula" initiative.
Without the new initiative, the high school's status under the state's Quality Performance Accreditation program would be "accredited on improvement."
That's because for the past two years, GCHS hasn't achieved Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) as mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act. To make AYP, a school must show that a state-determined, annually increasing percentage of students -- overall and in certain demographic subgroups -- have passed state reading and math assessments.
According to the Kansas State Department of Education, schools that are accredited on improvement must develop and implement a "corrective plan of action" approved by the state, and must implement any corrective actions proscribed by the state board.
The schools that achieve all requirements two years in a row can regain fully accredited status.If they fail to meet requirements five years in a row, schools can lose accreditation and the state department can enact sanctions such as reassigning personnel or restructuring the school district.
Schools also have to notify the public each year of their accreditation status.
However, the Kansas system changed this fall when the state board approved the expected gains formula -- a new way for schools to demonstrate progress even if they're short of the initial AYP targets, Nordby said.
The formula allows schools to maintain their accreditation if they can show growth in overall student performance at a rate equal to the state's average rate of improvement, along with showing improvement in the performance of all the demographic subgroups measured by the state.
Nordby said GCHS was chosen as a pilot school for the formula.
The state will consider the high school's spring 2008 assessment results as base data, and GCHS's level of improvement will be measured by comparing last spring's results to the ones taken in spring 2009.
Since the state is waiting on 2009 data to determine whether the pilot schools demonstrate adequate progress under the new formula, it has for this year "frozen" the qualifying schools' accreditation statuses, Nordby said.
Although GCHS is fully accredited, it's still required to develop a corrective plan of action to take advantage of the expected gains formula, Nordby said. Staff will submit the plan to the state later this fall.
Also on Monday, Nordby discussed other assessments the district uses to measure student performance.
Results from the other testing don't play into No Child Left Behind's Adequate Yearly Progress, but they can affect a school's accreditation status, Nordby said.
USD 457 also gives students formative assessments at the start and middle of the school year to get an idea of what state standards students know and what they need to learn, he said.
"We try to provide reliable, usable data" for teachers, he said.
Other assessments include ACT's EXPLORE test for eighth graders, used to compare Garden City students to others nationwide and to give students an idea of their career strengths and interests, as well as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, given at randomly selected schools to provide data for the National Report Card on American students' abilities in reading, math and science.
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