Principal Judy Puglisi has been keeping track of which of her students are slipping behind and could become dropouts. Now New Haven is about to start tracking those kids at all its high schools as part of a new grading system.
Melissa Bailey File Photo
Puglisi (pictured) takes special notice of the names that pop out in pink from a color-coded a list of students at her high school. Pink stands for “off-track,” missing school days and slipping behind in class.
As the district prepares to “grade” its high schools for the first time, it has come up with a new tool to monitor whether those kids get back on track by the end of the year.
The new analytic tool, called a “graduation trajectory,” was aired for the first time at a school board meeting last week. The announcement came just one day before the city launched a major initiative to encourage kids to go to college by paying for their tuition.
About 62 percent of New Haven Public School students graduate from high school in four years. The district aims to boost that to 77 percent through a citywide reform effort that’s putting extra accountability on teachers, principals and schools.
Puglisi (in photo above), who took the helm of the Metropolitan Business Academy this year, said she has started to receive reports generated from a new database outlining whether her kids are “on-track,” “at-risk,” or “off-track.” Those designations are based on school attendance and grades in classes, she said. Teachers meet every Friday to discuss how students are doing, and discuss interventions if need be.
The “graduation trajectory” would extend this concept across all schools. It would give the district a yearly update on whether students at the city’s nine high schools are getting the credits they need in order to graduate.
Most recent data show that 27 percent of students drop out from district high schools.
Of the 1,554 students in the Class of 2008, 62 percent graduated high school in four years, according to school officials. A total of 548 students fell off track along the way. They either got held back in school, left to get a GED, discontinued education, or had “unknown whereabouts.”
Keeping kids on track will be a key factor when the city ranks its high schools at the end of the month, according to a proposal aired last week. As part of the reform drive, all schools will be graded into three “tiers,” then managed differently or even reconstituted based on which category they fall into.
An initial batch of elementary schools got graded in the spring; two so-called “turnarounds” are undergoing major changes. Another 7 – 10 will be identified later this month to undergo changes next school year, based on which tier they fall into.
The tiering, which is due to take place the week of Nov. 29, will be the first time the city has given grades to its nine high schools. Elementary schools were tiered based largely on how they performed on the Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT), which is given for students in grades three to eight. Unlike elementary schools, high schools don’t take state standardized tests for many years in a row. They take one state test sophomore year, called the Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT). So the accountability watchdogs looked for another way to check in on their progress.
Melissa Bailey File Photo
School reform czar Garth Harries (pictured) and data analyst Katya Levitan-Reiner shared what they came up with at last Monday’s full board meeting. (Their proposal for grading high schools starts on Page 12 of this report.)
In preparing, the duo considered “the core business of high school”: A school has to teach kids across-the-board knowledge in different subject areas — ones that may not be covered on standardized tests.
“We want schools to be looking across the disciplines,” Harries said.
To measure this, they decided to look at how many class credits each kid is acquiring each year toward graduation.
Students need at least 24 credits to graduate high school, according to district-wide rules (some individual high schools require more). To get there, they’d need six by the end of freshman year, 12 by the end of sophomore year, and 18 by the end of junior year.
The “graduation trajectory” aims to get at whether kids are meeting those thresholds on time or falling behind.
The proposed tool crunches three bits of info: How many credits a student accumulates, and their scores on standardized tests in the eighth and tenth grade. Here’s how it would work:
Calculate how many students met their appropriate credit threshold (six credits for freshmen, 12 for sophomores, etc. ) by the end of the year.
For sophomore and junior years, see if those students scored proficient or higher on math, reading, writing and science on the CAPT. Meeting both those criteria — credits and test scores — constitutes the school’s graduation .
The percentage of students in each class (freshmen, sophomores, etc. ) who met the graduation trajectory criteria, combined in a weighted average, combines to a magic final number intended to show how many kids are “on-track” to graduate.
To put those scores in context, the duo proposed also considering how students fared on their eighth-grade CMT.
The CMT “shows how prepared they are for high school work” when they enter freshman year, Harries said. He proposed combining that with the gradation trajectory, probably through two axes on a graph.
Harries called it “an important and powerful way to think about students in high school.” He said it would “indicate the importance of looking across a student’s full course load.” The trajectory would measure kids who might do fine on a standardized test but fail an art class, losing credit toward graduation.
School board member Alex Johnston called the method “clever.”
Board members declined to take a vote on the new tool, or on other tweaks to the tiering system that were also proposed Monday.
Further discussion and a vote are set to take place at the board’s next meeting on Nov. 22.