Antwan Wilson
September 15, 2015

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The Cadre Districts began in 2010 equally a collaboration across school districts exploring ways to improve teaching and learning. In 2013, several school districts in the CORE consortium received a federal waiver from some provisions of the No Child Left Backside law and are working together to develop a new School Quality Comeback Index to provide more and better information nigh schools and the learning needs of students.
In this series of essays published as a public service past EdSource, the CORE districts depict their new schoolhouse improvement system, and the often difficult decisions district leaders had to make to develop a system that more adequately and comprehensively measures how well schools and students are doing. The 6 school districts developing this new accountability arrangement are Long Beach Unified, Los Angeles Unified, Santa Ana Unified, Fresno Unified, Oakland Unified and San Francisco Unified.
In this second part of the serial, Oakland Unified School District Superintendent Antwan Wilson, a member of CORE's Board of Directors , describes the challenge of how to measure whether students leaving eye school are set up for high schoolhouse.

Part Two:  Measuring High Schoolhouse Readiness

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Oakland Unified Superintendent Antwan Wilson

As nosotros began designing the CORE Districts' new School Quality Improvement Alphabetize, my colleagues and I came to a swift consensus that we wanted to include a metric rooted in one of the near difficult transitions in K-12 education: how well a educatee traverses the path from middle to high school. For the Oakland Unified Schoolhouse District (OUSD), this is a pivotal time where nosotros see students leaving the organization, and those that stay often non being prepared for high schoolhouse success or our ultimate goal – higher, career and community success.

Inquiry shows – and our educators' experience tells united states of america – that we are losing far as well many kids during this transition. We also know that students who drop out of school usually don't make the conclusion on a whim. Rather, it is a slow procedure of withdrawal that begins in center school. Simply if students do drop out, information technology ofttimes occurs during the ixth course or the summer following nineth grade.

To learn more, nosotros decided to track the persistence of 8th graders – those who successfully get in through to high school – past calculating the percentage of students who left 8th form and were still enrolled in tenth course as role of our School Quality Improvement System.

This seemed like a logical and relatively piece of cake way for us to provide valuable information to eye schools virtually the risk factors linked to dropouts associated with their schools. Once we did the research, yet, we found that the percentage of students who finished 8th grade and were withal enrolled in 10th course was not every bit valuable a piece of data as we had hoped and did non give us the data we were really seeking. To our surprise, we found that a significant number of students were still enrolled when they reached 10th grade – an apparent indicator of a successful transition from heart school.

When we dug into the data a piffling more deeply it became clear that many of those 10thursday-grade students were then deficient in school credits that they were non truly on a path to graduating from loftier school. Using our original metric – the percentage of 8th graders who were still enrolled in high school in the 10th form – might make schools announced to be on the right track, but would non enhance the red flags we desired to ensure the entire system focused on the kids in demand of intervention.

Nosotros also encountered data limitations with our original metric. For instance, in districts such as OUSD where many students elect to nourish charter schools afterward 8thursday form, tracking students is not as manageable because so many of them are no longer with the district. Further, the research was unclear as to the extent to which students' persistence in loftier schoolhouse is attributable to their experiences in eye schoolhouse. Our schoolhouse district information and assessment experts were concerned that center schools would be unfairly held answerable for how students did in high school. So nosotros began to rethink how we might use pupil persistence rates as part of the school improvement arrangement we are designing.

In the fall of 2014, after extensive consideration among our schoolhouse districts, the Cadre board of directors voted to change the focus to middle schoolhouse measures that information showed were quite predictive of high schoolhouse success and graduation. These included a GPA of 3.0 or better, scoring at a good level on math and English language linguistic communication arts standardized tests, an attendance rate of 96% or better and a history of no suspensions.

Initially, these appeared to exist good indicators of whether or not an eightth grader was truly on rails to graduate high school. Additionally, it seemed that gathering the data would be a straightforward task and student achievement would be directly owing to middle schoolhouse. However, when we examined a large cohort of students from the high school class of 2013, nosotros saw that 80% would not have met the new criteria – yet many of them however graduated from high schoolhouse.

After further work and refinement we constitute that slightly lowering the GPA threshold from 3.0 (to 2.5, for example) would provide a more accurate view of 8th graders who could be expected to graduate from loftier school on time. Further, nosotros decided against using students' scores on standardized tests at this stage because of the transition to Smarter Balanced tests and the uncertainty of the correlation between those examination results and pupil success in loftier schoolhouse.

Ultimately we decided that our High School Readiness Rate would best be measured in center school by the percentage of viiith graders in a school who had a GPA of 2.5 or better, no D's or F's in English arts or math, attendance of 96% or better and no suspensions. Based on our initial analysis of the high schoolhouse class of 2022 in one of our districts, 9 out of x students who graduated would have met these criteria when they were in the 8th grade.

The piece of work was non over yet, though. We besides spent a significant amount of time working with our colleagues designing shared definitions around issues like which viiith-grade English linguistic communication arts and math courses to consider as a core courses (vs. a helper/support grade like tutoring). We discovered, for case, that we couldn't just use the state's CALPADS course codes for this because they are likewise broad, so our piece of work with course-taking is compiled commune by commune.

Further, simply projecting those students who are highly likely to graduate on time was not enough. We as well wanted measurements that would provide us more fine-grained information. We idea of it as a "traffic light arroyo." For those students fulfilling the requirements, the light would be green. But for those that were struggling, we would create a ruby-red group to place the substantive number of students nearly at risk of not graduating as they enter high school. For those students in the yellowish category, while it might not trigger intensive interventions, it would aid educators target additional needs for assistance. This way, we could best target interventions.

Nosotros had a deep and, at times, challenging discussion near this newly proposed metric. My school colleagues and I also believed that information on whether students were on a trajectory to go to college, not only graduate from high school, was critical and should be part of our system too. To address these concerns, we agreed to develop some other two indicators in add-on to the High School Readiness Charge per unit: i) a higher readiness indicator; and 2) viiithursday graders about at risk of not graduating from loftier school on fourth dimension.

We accept been working to develop measurements of these factors. Neither is fully developed yet, simply the college readiness indicator is intended to show whether high school graduates are indeed graduating "higher ready." Information technology might include criteria similar a pupil'southward score on the Early Assessment Plan tests, Human activity scores and other measures.

The indicator of 8th graders at take chances of non graduating from high school on fourth dimension is closer to completion and volition probable exist calculated by looking at the percentage of students with a GPA of 2.0 or less, receiving D'south or F's in English language arts or math, attendance rates of 92% or less, and any suspensions.

Our work to refine how we mensurate high school readiness amongst 8th graders will continue, simply we have already learned much along the way. Our progress (including mistakes) has shown us that accountability systems need to be continuously monitored and revised. It has besides demonstrated the need for local innovation and the great value of ongoing collaborative input from experienced educators in their design. By identifying schools that are performing well, as well every bit those that are struggling, we can acquire from ane another and work together to ameliorate student achievement.

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Antwan Wilson is superintendent of  the Oakland Unified School District and  a member of the CORE board of directors.

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