nothin Data Breakdown Highlights Transience Challenge | New Haven Independent

Data Breakdown Highlights Transience Challenge

Melissa Bailey File Photo

Breland: Coping with mid-year charter-school transfers.

Some 14.5 percent of all of Principal Sabrina Breland’s students at Wexler/Grant Community School transferred in last year after Oct. 1.

That statistic appeared in preliminary data sets” the Board of Ed has begun examining in a complex quest to the best way of measure how schools perform and help them improve.

The Board of Ed used to do that through tiering” — using basic data to categorize schools based on student performance, then requiring major changes as a result. Tiering was first implemented after the 2009 school reform effort and then discarded after three years.

Now officials are diving far deeper into data to try to understand schools’ challenges and then craft improvement plans.

At a recent meeting of a board committee focused on the data quest, members asked for data broken down by school. Superintendent Garth Harries subsequently provided members with a thick packet of data sets tracking several measures at each district school for the last four years, including academic performance markers and stats on challenges like chronic absenteeism.

The information is preliminary, Harries stressed. Principals received copies of data sets from their schools.

Coping With Charter Switchovers

Breland said two of the main factors affecting Wexler/Grant’s performance are high rates of transience and disciplinary issues.

According to the district’s preliminary data sheet, 14.5 percent of students at Wexler/Grant last school year transferred in after Oct. 1. The rate of suspensions in the student body was a relative high average of .4 suspensions per student.

Last year, just 46.2 percent of the school’s first-graders were on track for literacy.

Many of the schools in the district where academic performance is the greatest challenge are ones that have the highest rates of transience,” Harries said to the Independent.

Even so, tying these numbers together directly is difficult; Many factors may affect a school’s performance. But the data creates a fuller picture of what individual schools are dealing with, including specific challenges instead of ignoring them.

Higher rates of transience can lead to less cohesion and more disciplinary issues within a school, taking away time administrators could use to supervise teachers — a far-reaching complaint, according to a district climate” survey released in October. Some schools, such as Hillhouse High School, have deans of discipline to allow administrators to focus on higher-level issues.

Some of the behaviors interfere with teachers being able to do their best,” Breland said. She said she would like more time in the classroom to coach teachers, but spends too much time dealing with behavioral management.”

She said she doesn’t think the district can help what she calls a global situation,” unless they force magnet schools to handle some of the transient population, essentially ruining the lottery system. Many of Wexler/Grant’s new students were formerly students at Achievement First charter schools, including two who arrived just last week — bringing the student population up to 421. Breland asked the mother of her two new students why she switched them over to Wexler Grant; the mother responded that the charter school had been too strict.

They feel like they’ve been mistreated so much there. When they come to our schools, we suffer” the consequences, Breland said.

She called on parents to be more active in the schools and work with administrators to help students having problems adjusting.

I would like our school to be a safer place for teachers to learn and work,” she said.

Curve,” Not Standard

Board members at a recent committee meeting discussed how to hold the district accountable for making that happen.

A benefit of the tiering system, which grouped schools into three tiers based on specific performance factors, was the fail safe [that] if you end up in tier 3b, something’s going to happen,” board member Alex Johnston (pictured) said. A mechanism of accountability” should be built into the replacement system, he said, as well as a bar for excellence for schools to aspire to.

Mayor Toni Harp said she worried that a single standard of improvement would harm schools, many of which are so far from that.” She instead suggested a curve” of improvement, where schools are given credit for specific increments of progress, depending on their status.

If a school does not improve the required 10 percent in a given standard, for example, we intervene and intervene strong,” she said.

Harp called on the board to think about how to use policy to address points like transience. If we keep saying transience in schools” is a problem and don’t address it, we’re chasing our tails,” she said. Policy is the only tool we have.”

She said the district should consider hiring outside consultants to figure out a proposal to address some of that data.

Harries said redistribution of resources or transient students were potential solutions, but the district would have to consider to what extent do we want to spread transience to happen at all schools. If transience is an equity issue…do our resources reflect our relative priorities?”

Ultimately, the solutions should be school-specific, Nast said. He said it does not make sense to compare two schools with different issues, since not all schools need the same resources.

Most of the data were previously available, now newly compiled into school-specific reports, Harries said. A lot of the data points existed, but we weren’t necessarily paying close attention to them.”

To achieve success, a school needs good leadership and organization, a committed community and access to resources, he said. Struggling schools have a gap in at least one of these areas.

Mayor Harp said that the district had to play in role in reforming those schools.

What happens when we see a school that’s failing to thrive?” she said What does that trigger in [the district] in terms of action?”

Harries responded that the district would assess whether or not that school’s resources are out of whack with the challenge,” and provide assistance accordingly.

If you’re Clemente and have 70 percent of kids coming in after October 1st … we should all be accountable for that,” Harries said.

Dave Cicarella, president of the teachers’ union, took the mic during the public commentary portion to echo board members’ sentiments of tiering as a discouraging thing for schools.” He said the district cannot set an arbitrary goal to say, This is where we want everyone to be.’”

The next teaching and learning committee meeting is in January.

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