Thursday, June 7, 2012

The results are in...

It's been a long few weeks of testing, remediation, and retesting, and the results are finally in. But let me back up.

Two weeks ago, my babies geared up for the biggest three days of the school year: end-of-grade testing. They spent a day taking reading and two days taking math (with a calculator and without a calculator). I expected to be much more excited for my kids this year than last year, because overall they worked so much harder than my kids last year. However, as the day got closer, I realized that they had also had so much more to overcome. They came to me after having substitute teacher after substitute teacher in their math classroom as 6th graders. As a whole, they were lower than my the group my first year, and I was scared. Many of them busted their butts all year, and they would certainly show growth, but would it be enough to pass the test?

Unfortunately, for many of my kids, it wasn't enough. The day the results came back, our instructional coach told me it didn't look good. I was sick to my stomach; how would I tell my kids that they didn't do as well as we had hoped? Soon after my principal came down the hallway, the scores in her hands and a tired look on her face. Three of my four classes had less than a 50% pass rate. So many kids that I thought had a chance at passing missed the mark by just a few points. We had been so excited to bask in the glory of our success, that we had never imagined anything else.

Overall, 7th grade math had the highest pass rate in the school out of 7 tested areas, followed closely behind by 8th grade math (my babies from last year and my roommate's current class). After retesting, we even made it into the 60% range for proficiency, which is a pretty big deal for a school whose composite is usually about 40%. But it just didn't feel like enough. I felt discouraged, like all of our hard work had led us nowhere. And then God opened my eyes to some bright spots that truly made me proud.

A few days after receiving the results, our school's transformational coach pulled me aside after school. She is hired by the state to help our principal turn the school around, and while we don't always see eye to eye, her opinion does matter to me. I was nervous when she called me into her office, expecting her to say that she was disappointed by the numbers she saw for my classes. But instead, she began gushing in her sweet southern accent about how wonderful my scores were. I was confused; had she looked at the wrong papers? I told her I was a bit discouraged by the percentages, and that I had expected higher. She informed me that she hadn't even paid attention to the percentages; she had been focusing on growth, and my kids had grown significantly from last year. She pulled up the spreadsheet on her computer, and I was dumbfounded.

My eyes ran across the "Total points growth" column quickly, and my heart raced as I read: 5 points; 8 points; 12 points; 17 points; 10 points; 22 points....my kids had come so far from last year. While we don't really know what is "normal" in terms of growth, the goal for my kids was 7 points, and what we were seeing was amazing. All four of my classes averaged at least 7 points growth, with one class averaging 10 points growth. AVERAGING. That means there were several students in each class with well above 7 and 10 points growth. Even if they hadn't passed, they were significantly closer to being on grade-level than they were last year. I left her office beaming, grateful for a new perspective that reaffirmed my faith in both my kids and myself.

I consider all of my classes to be success stories. Knowing how hard they worked, how bad they wanted it, and how much they grew, there's no question in my mind that we were successful in so many ways. But I've got a real success story that makes me prouder than I ever thought possible. My homeroom rocked it. I mean, ROCKED it, y'all. They had 96% pass rate- all but ONE student passed, and the one student who didn't pass came to me less than 2 months ago, with hardly any basic math knowledge. And because she came so late in the year her score technically doesn't count. This means if we're being technical, we had a 100% pass rate! It gets better. Last year, this same group of 6th grade students had only 2 students pass advanced. This year, we had 10, count them, 10 students pass advanced! But wait! There's more! There are 5 major goals in 7th grade math, and my homeroom babies were at least 7 percentage points above the state average in ALL FIVE GOALS. In one goal, they were 16 points above the state average. These are students in a school that normally performs significantly below every other school in the state. And my babies blew the state average out of the water. I do understand that these students are naturally gifted at math. In fact, many of them managed to pass last year, even without a math teacher. So you may say that they didn't need me. But what I love the most is the last statistic that proves that we worked hard together, and that what we did together mattered. Even though they were already high-performing, they still averaged over 8 points growth as a class. I had students that passed last year grow 10, 12, even 14 points in my class. That is HUGE.

Although these last days are long, some of the best moments of the year are seeing the faces of the kids who have never passed an EOG before when you tell them their passing score. Hands down one of my favorite 30 minutes of this school year was announcing the news to my homeroom that we had the highest pass rate in the school, and watching the kids take off running around the room when they got their scores. Those moments make it all worth it.

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