District report card shows improvement
The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction released their annual school report cards, and the Shorewood School District received 83.8 points, meaning that it “significantly exceeds expectations.”
“It’s just validation of all the really hard work the teachers and the staff and the students do to make sure the high school is really fantastic,” said Paru Shah, school board president.
The report card tends to act as a summary rather than a source of new information. According to the DPI’s website, it uses data from multiple categories to come up with a score: student achievement, growth, closing gaps, and post-secondary success. Data includes test scores, demographics and attendance rates.
The district as a whole saw an increase in its overall score by one point since 2016. There is more variation in the scores given to each school: Atwater received an 83.7, Lake Bluff an 83.0, SIS a 75.1, and SHS a 91.8. All schools fall in the “significantly exceeds expectations” category besides SIS, which was deemed to “exceed expectations.”
“That’s similar to how we’ve done in years past,” said Tim Joynt, director of curriculum. “Specifically at the high school, we had a pretty large uptick. This is the first year that the DPI has added school growth measures to the high school, and that takes a look at year to year growth by students… and the high school did particularly well in that area. What growth is looking at is how far do students grow academically compared to one school year? So, do students make one academic year of growth in one academic school year?”
While the district didn’t see any major declines in student growth, they were able to identify areas in which they need to improve.
“We did notice that we still need to continue to look at our ELA instruction in particular,” Joynt said. “Our ELA scores were, in most cases, lagging behind our math scores.”
The results of the report card typically provide further evidence about known problems rather than new information, as most of the data used is already available to the district.
“There are some important indicators on the report card, most of which we’ve covered already, the big one being the Forward Exam,” said Emily Berry, school board member. “I remain really concerned about the decline in Forward exam scores that we saw in sixth, seventh and eighth grade, but by the time the report cards came out those weren’t a surprise.”
In the 2018-19 school year, the district saw a decrease in the number of students who performed at proficient or advanced levels on the Wisconsin Forward Exam, a standardized test administered to students from third grade to eighth grade. Test scores are a factor in determining a school’s score, so it was expected that the recent decrease would be reflected in the student achievement portion of the report card.
“The only reason really that I pay attention to the report cards and not just the underlying data is that they’re a common thing that people look at when they’re choosing school districts to locate in,” Berry said. “The report card is an easy way to get a snapshot, so for that reason, I think we have to pay attention to it. If I’m trying to judge, as a board member, the general health of our school district, it’s not necessarily the first thing that I would turn to.”
Joynt also sees the report card as confirmation that existing initiatives are on track.
“If we’re going to take anything away from it, we still need to work on ELA, we still need to work on closing gaps, [and] we still need to continue to focus on student growth, which are three areas we have been working on, so in some ways it’s kind of nice to know that some of the areas that we’re working on are aligned with what we need to be working on.”