2x

Data helps school double Algebra I PARCC passing rate

The drive to High Point Regional High School in Sussex County reminds you of why New Jersey is called “The Garden State.” Along the way, past murmuring streams and through vast fields, are ample opportunities to buy locally sourced products. Corn, oats, and hay. Homemade pies. Fresh farm cheese.

High Point sits on a literal high point. Nestled on a hill, the school overlooks a farm with a pond, red barn, and silo. The bucolic setting will rekindle that forgotten dream of one day opening a bed and breakfast. But the serenity on the outside of High Point belies the school spirit and excitement for teaching and learning within its walls.

In July 2018, excitement of the celebratory kind swept through High Point and the adjacent administration building. Results of the end-of-the-year exams from PARCC had just come in and one statistic seemed written in banner type: The percentage of kids passing the Algebra I assessment had more than doubled. The beast wasn’t tamed – the Algebra I PARCC exam continues to be the bane of virtually every district in New Jersey and beyond – but High Point had silenced the roar that’s long been echoing its halls.

The school’s 102.5% increase is an extraordinary single-year achievement. It’s the reward of the hard work and perseverance of students and teachers, with some guidance from the data insight gleaned from LinkIt!.

To know High Point’s full story, you have to turn back the calendar a full year.

‍

Disbelief becomes re-dedication

Seamus Campbell, High Point’s director of curriculum and instruction, sat in his office in July 2017 trying to make sense of what was in front of him. The results from the Spring 2017 PARCC administration showed another disappointing Algebra I passing rate. With scatter plots all over his desk, he immersed himself in the state-provided reports. A 25-year High Point veteran with close connections to the staff, he knew the passing percentage was a contradiction to what he saw happening in the classrooms every day.

We have exceptional math teachers, we really do,” Campbell said. “They knew they were better than that score, they knew our kids were better than that score.”

Algebra I PARCC scores at High Point had been low since the introduction of the test but Campbell knew this was the time he needed to figure out why. The 2017-18 school year was pivotal since the state department of education had planned to make the passage of Algebra I a graduation requirement for 2018-2019. With more than two-thirds of students taking Algebra I here in High Point rather than in the school’s feeding districts, now was the time to look the beast in the eye.

Multiple factors were at the root of the low passage rate, that much was clear, but which ones? Was the school curriculum misaligned with New Jersey Student Learning Standards? Was it the course pacing? Was it the textbook and sequence of chapters? Were some standards de- emphasized in the classroom, perhaps being rolled into Algebra II? Did the school curriculum differ substantially from the model curriculum that the DOE provides for every grade and every subject?

The PARCC data alone couldn’t provide the answers.

“I would go to [area] math supervisor meetings and we would all sit there like a big therapy group of 45 people wondering what all these PARCC reports meant,” recalls Brian Drelick, supervisor of STEM who works with the science, math, technological studies and business departments. “There was just so much information and no real way of readily analyzing it and making it meaningful.”

Without a data analytics solution, High Point was left with its own unit tests and formative assessments to inform instruction and guide intervention, used in conjunction with data from instructional software platforms such as those provided by Carnegie Learning.

‍

Changing the culture and the introduction to LinkIt!

Dr. Scott Ripley, superintendent, graciously credits everyone around him when something goes well. With nary a gleam in his eye and barely a hint of self-deprecation, he calls himself “a figurehead.” But make no mistake, the man has a vision and shrewdly set the stage for a data revolution in High Point. You see his foresight now in hindsight, the small steps toward change taken over the years.

Block scheduling begun three years ago gave teachers common planning time and the opportunity for dialogue and reflection. Instructional technology added during the last five years not only gave High Point a 1-to-1 computer to student ratio, it provided teachers with opportunities to use more blended learning and master their own command of technology.

Now, finally, High Point was at the confluence of need, planning, and positioning. Teachers themselves saw the need for a data solution and asked for it, they had the common planning time embedded into their schedule to effectively use it, and they had the computer skills and confidence to work it. That’s not chance, that’s leadership. The planets and stars may align out of orbital happenstance, but this was grand design.

“My quest to have data truly drive instructional planning and educational decision-making goes back eight years, that's how long it's taken,” said Ripley, who has been with the district for 21 years, six as superintendent. “We're way up here isolated in the frozen tundra [rural northern New Jersey], so we had a culture here that was very insulated.

“When I was director of curriculum, it quickly became obvious that we needed to come out of the Dark Ages. As exceptional as our institution is and as phenomenal as our educators are, we needed to foster change. And we needed to do it slowly at a macro level. When you do it right, you get true, lasting institutional change. That’s what you’re seeing now at High Point with the use of data.”

The decision to pilot LinkIt! was easy to make, according to Campbell. With representatives frequently presenting at conferences and workshops, and regular seminars of its own, the company is an active part of the New Jersey educational community.

Every spring, LinkIt! also allows districts the opportunity to pilot the service for free. And can anyone really turn down free?

High Point set its sights on Algebra I. With the PARCC exam fast approaching. LinkIt! provided training to math teachers on the use of the LinkIt! dashboard and High Point Algebra I students completed the LinkIt! spring benchmark. (LinkIt! benchmarks, finely tuned instruments aligned with state standards, are offered three times a year and provide accurate predictors of student PARCC performance.)

“The results provided clarity and explained to teachers how each of their kids were doing three-quarters of the way through the school year, which we never really had a sense of before,” Drelick said. “LinkIt! showed us which students were struggling with functions, which were struggling with exponents... It gave teachers an objective, standards-based mechanism that provided feedback not from a previous school year in another district, but from yesterday in their own classroom.”

With results clearly showing each student’s strengths and weaknesses on state standards, teachers were armed with powerful insight that would help them prepare students for the precise math they would ultimately see on PARCC. Using the benchmark results, class grades, and personal suggestions, the teachers divided students into half a dozen groups and conducted an algebra boot camp over several days. Teachers provided breakfast and prizes. The intensive personalized instruction was, as Drelick described, “a huge, wonderful coming together.”

Then, with about a month until the Algebra I PARCC exam, the teachers dug in. During the year, they had worked diligently and methodically with their kids. The math interventionist, Kirstin Sabo, did what she does best and with her usual level of commitment; she pushed into specific math classes which needed support and sometimes worked with students at night and on Saturdays. The LinkIt! data, though, was a new and unique lens by which to see student achievement.

“LinkIt!’s value was unique, given the immediateness of the feedback, arriving during the school year when it could be used, not after it,” Campbell said. “The teacher buy-in went from strong to unquestioning when they received the benchmark results the day after giving the test. One click, here's what kids know, there's what they don't know. As far as this being a valuable tool, game over when they saw that.”

High Point had just taken a giant step toward establishing a true data culture.

‍

First-year implementation and literacy across the curriculum

Because of the successful experience with LinkIt! during the Algebra I pilot, High Point expanded its use of LinkIt! in 2018-19.

Bringing the entire faculty onto the LinkIt! platform was obviously essential. Beyond that, however, the administration set two initial goals.

Regional high schools are at a distinct data disadvantage. Feeding districts generally only provide students’ historical grades and most-recent PARCC scores and sub-scores. It’s barely enough to place incoming freshmen in the appropriate course level (e.g., honors, general, etc.), but the exact standards that students have mastered and still need to master are mostly unknown.

LinkIt! bridged that information gap. In September 2018, all freshmen took LinkIt!’s eighth-grade benchmarks in science, English language arts, and math. The results provided teachers with an important foundational reference that they could immediately use to differentiate instruction; it also gave them a bank of current data unique to their own students which they could work with to better learn the LinkIt! user interface and its rich feature set.

ELA benchmarks were also given to students in grades 10-12 for a much more ambitious goal. The entire school immersed itself in moving the literacy needle. Teachers of every discipline were tasked with working together to strengthen the literacy standards relevant to their classes. They were also asked to develop assessments to show how well their students performed in those targeted areas.

More often than not, the literacy skills are embedded in each subject or class curriculum, so it was a matter of teachers reflecting on what they are already doing to support literacy and then ratcheting those activities up to an even higher level.

“Sometimes we get very content-focused because we love our subject,” said Aldo Deodino, supervisor of humanities. “We love history, we love science, math, but you forget that there are universally transferable skills: reading and writing. The teachers saw the importance of what we were saying and began to ask the right questions. ‘I'm a health teacher, now how do I take this idea of point of view and really make it meaningful for my students?’ It’s a reminder that the curriculum has skills associated throughout, it’s not all content.”

The administration is taking the use of data one day at a time, one step at a time. When you’re dealing with one building and a close-knit staff, you can afford that flexibility. But High Point’s building-level literacy intensive was clearly developed to not only help students but to also get faculty members in every subject area aboard the data train. In the next round of ELA benchmarks, when student proficiency in reading and writing improves, and it will, everyone can feel a part of the success. It will be one more milestone in the school culture paradigm shift.

“A lot of our common prep time has been focused on student activities and the delivery of instruction,” Campbell said. “’What activity did you do and how was the lesson?’ Now our conversations are becoming more focused on results, ‘What was the student's level of success, is it measurable, and how can we improve it?’ And that's the big game changer of data.”

In the end, High Point’s Algebra I success was about more than just using numbers – it was about a cultural shift that harnessed the power of data to enhance learning. High Point set a new standard for collaboration and innovation. As the results continue to show, when schools embrace data as a tool for growth, the sky is no longer the limit, it’s just the beginning.

Client: LinkIt!