Hamden Schools Target Achievement Gap, Absenteeism

In response to test results and other metrics of district performance, the Hamden Board of Education has drafted five new goals for the next three years, including equity and high school achievement.

The board will vote on the new goals at its next meeting on Feb. 12.

The board’s Goals and Evaluation Committee met on Dec. 6 to draft the goals that it wants to guide the district in the next three years. The committee decided upon three: third-grade reading proficiency, eight-grade algebra readiness, and reduced chronic absenteeism.

A fourth, closing the achievement gap, remained too broad and too complicated to pin down at that meeting, so the committee decided to meet again to discuss it.

When the committee met again last week to talk about the achievement gap, it ended up adding not one, but two more goals to its roster: increase equity districtwide, and improve student performance at the high school. It also decided that closing the achievement gap, rather than being its own item, should be included in all of the five goals.

According to Superintendent Jody Goeler, this is the first year that the board is crafting specific goals for the district rather than just looking at the test results and trying to improve those. The board hopes that these objectives will drive the work the district does in the next few years, and that by achieving these more holistic goals, the district will also improve on its assessments.

Reading, Calculating — & Showing Up

The first two goals — reading proficiency by the end of third grade, and algebra readiness by the end of eighth grade — are based on nationwide standards and research.

“The first two goals are based on them being real benchmark goals for success in school and later,” said Director of Innovation, Technology, and Communications Karen Kaplan. The committee deemed that both of these benchmarks would be strategic places to focus in order to improve overall district performance.

Research shows, said Kaplan, that the end of third grade is a pivotal moment for determining student success later on. Students who do not reach reading proficiency by that point begin to fall further and further behind they peers. For the last three academic years, around 50 percent of Hamden’s third graders have scored at or above grade level on the Smarter Balanced assessment, a test administered to students in grades three through eight: 49.6 percent were at or above proficiency in 2015 – 2016, 52.1 percent in 2016 – 2017, and 50.0 percent in 2017 – 2018, right around the state’s averages of 53.9 percent, 51.8 percent, and 53.1 percent in those years, respectively.

Likewise, students who are ready to start algebra by the beginning of ninth grade tend to have much greater success both in the rest of school and beyond. Hamden’s Smarter Balanced scores on math were lower than it’s reading scores in ​’15-’16, ​’16-’17, and ​’17-‘18. The percentage of students at or above proficiency in grades 3 – 8 hovered around 40 percent (38.1, 42.9, and 41.9, respectively) in the last three years. The state fared better, but not by much. Its percentages grew from 44.0 in ​’15-’16 to 46.8 in ​’17-’18.

The third goal — to reduce chronic absenteeism — was a response to higher-than-desired rates of chronic absenteeism in the district. The state, according to Kaplan, is very concerned about chronic absenteeism.

Specifically, the committee would like to see a reduction of chronic absenteeism to 13.2 percent by the 2020 – 21 school year. As defined by the state, any student who is absent more than 10 percent of school days in a year is deemed chronically absent. That means a student may miss no more than 18 days each year in order to avoid the designation. In the last school year, the district had 15 percent of its students chronically absent — 11.5 percent in grades K‑6, and 18.5 percent in grades 7 – 12.

Closing the achievement gap between different subgroups within the district will feature in each one of these goals. Goeler said that the board and the administration felt that if they could ​“move the needle on one group,” that would allow them to improve the achievement of the whole district. Yet the board had also questioned whether in fact the reverse would be best — focusing on elevating performance districtwide, thereby improving the performance of specific subgroups. By subsuming specific subgroup achievement goals under the other goals, the district will be able both to give targeted support to the subgroups that need it most, and to help improve the performance of the district overall.

Equity, High School Performance

The fourth goal — to increase equity districtwide — is still a bit more amorphous than the first three. Board members and administrative staff cited a number of areas in which equity could be improved.

“Some students need significantly more resources,” said Walter Morton, a member of the board.

As Morton put it, when most people think of closing the achievement gap, they think of ​“how black and brown students compare to their peers.” While providing the resources for students of color to succeed will be an important part of meeting the equity goal and closing the achievement gap, there are other manifestations of inequity that need to be addressed as well.

At the meeting on Tuesday, Kaplan explained what the designation ​“high needs” means on the state’s Next Generation Accountability Report, a system that the state uses to evaluate each district’s performance.
​“High needs” refers to students who either are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, need special education services, or are English learners. All of these are also factors that the district will have to consider in its definition of equity.

Some of the inequities in the district exist between schools, rather than within them. ​“We have charged [the administration] to figure out how to provide more for the schools that have less,” said Lynn Campo, chair of the Goals and Evaluation Committee. These inequities oftentimes have to do with before- and after-school programming. The district itself provides equal resources to each elementary school. In fact, Title 1 schools (schools in which at least 40 percent of students qualify as ​“low-income”) receive some extra funding from the federal government — but not enough to offset the PTAs.

“The PTAs in some schools can overwhelm things that the district can do,” said Kaplan. Schools that serve wealthier parts of town have parents who can fund programming, both artistic and academic, outside of the regular school day, while parents at schools that serve lower-income areas cannot.

The fifth goal — to improve high school students’ performance — was a way of making sure that the district would not forget to focus on older students as well. The first two goals both focus specifically on younger grades, and many of the inequities in the district are between elementary schools. That heavy focus on younger students needed to be balanced with focus on high schoolers as well.

Looking forward

Achieving these goals will come down, in large part, to allocation of resources

“We need to get an idea of how our resources are currently being allocated,” said Morton, in order to shift resources to areas with the greatest need.

There are many areas in which the district will have to refocus and rethink funding, and the administration will soon begin to explore what exactly it will do. Administrators and board members offered a few examples of what they thought will be important.

Changes will come in large part with the 3R restructuring initiative that the board approved in November.

“One thing that will be huge in addressing the achievement gap around race is universal pre‑K,” said Morton. As a part of the sweeping redistricting and restructuring plan, the district will create universal, full-day pre‑K for every child in the district. ​“That right there I think is the single most impactful thing we can do to close that gap,” Morton continued. The children who are not able to attend pre‑K already arrive in kindergarten behind their peers, he explained. The new initiative will allow every child to arrive in kindergarten prepared.

The district will also have to look into reallocating resources for before- and after-school programs in order to smooth out the inequities that exist between elementary schools on that front.

Kaplan said she thought that transportation would be a major part of addressing the district’s goals. The middle school, for example, is far from southern Hamden. ​“How do [students] get home if they stay for tutoring, or homework help?” she asked.

Kaplan also explained that policies state that the district is not required to provide busses to high schoolers who live up to two miles away from school. Though she said she thought that Hamden did not have students who lived quite that far from the high school without a bus route, even one mile can be too far.

“If you live a mile away and you have to walk down Dixwell Avenue and the sidewalks haven’t been plowed yet,” she said, that would be a barrier for students who can’t drive, or don’t have someone who can drive them. Providing better transportation options, she added, will be an important way of reducing chronic absenteeism.

The fifth goal, Kaplan said, will require making AP classes more accessible to all students. The district will need to make sure teachers and counselors are encouraging students to enroll so that not only the students whose parents encourage them to will be able to take AP classes.

After the full board’s scheduled Feb. 12 vote, the district will begin the long and difficult process of district improvement.

“These are tough subjects,” said Kaplan. ​“Everyone around the state is dealing with the issue of differences of achievement among students.”