More than 30 people participated in Monday night’s annual school improvement team work session in the Dowagiac Middle School cafeteria.
Participants in the 90-minute special meeting included the Board of Education, administration, from building principals to Superintendent Dr. Mark Daniel, teachers and parents.
A couple of moms gave testimonials to Kincheloe Elementary School’s Reading Recovery program, which positions Dowagiac for a world where any new state funding will be in the form of performance incentives.
Each building — Justus Gage Principal Marcy Hendress, Kincheloe Principal Dawn Conner, Patrick Hamilton Principal Heather Nash, Sister Lakes Principal Gretchen Hart, DMS Co-Principal Matt Severin on behalf of himself and Mike Frazier and Union High Principal Paul Hartsig — was allotted five minutes to review assessment results, successes and areas targeted for improvement, then take questions.
Daniel noted that the combination of ever-increasing expectations to compete in a global marketplace coupled with achieving goals with diminished financial resources is leading a record number of his older colleagues to contemplate retirement from the data-driven, acronym-drenched arena.
Let’s look at Hartsig’s high school, which the former science teacher has guided since 2004, for the kind of information which makes up a five-year snapshot of student achievement.
In 2007, DUHS won a bronze medal from U.S. News and World Report.
The principal lists the school’s top five achievements as ranking in the top 30 percent of all schools in Michigan, a five-year average of 93.8 percent of seniors with definite post-secondary plans, $2,854,879 in scholarship money offered to seniors, 2,324 college credit hours earned by seniors at Southwestern Michigan College and other institutions and 34.8 percent of seniors graduating with a 3.0 (B)  grade-point average.
All freshmen are tested in social studies, with MEAP, the state educational assessment program, given in October on material taught in eighth grade.
Educators tracked a decline in scores and determined the falloff correlated with trimester scheduling, since not all students were enrolled in social studies.
Since Dowagiac scrapped trimesters for traditional semesters, ninth grade MEAP social studies scores stabilized and began to climb again.
Beginning this year, all freshmen will be taking a practice American College Test (ACT) provided through Cambridge Educational Services. It is an actual retired ACT test scored in the same manner.
Sophomores take the PLAN test, an ACT product used to measure student progress on ACT material, as well as to qualify a student to participate in dual enrollment for college credit. This test is given in October.
Juniors take the three-day Michigan Merit Exam each spring. It is comprised of the ACT, work keys math and reading and wrap-around science and social studies material.
DUHS staff is focusing on ACT college readiness standards as part of its curriculum.
All departments give ACT pre- and post-tests, then analyze data to pinpoint curriculum gaps.
Hartsig said college readiness scores increased by 6 percent in math, 3 percent in science, remained the same in English, but decreased by 2 percent in reading. Overall, DUHS college readiness increased by 4 percent.
Over the past five years, the principal reported, MME scores have remained steady while many other factors changed.
During this time frame, 2007-2011, the percentage of students classified as socio-economically disadvantaged increased.
Enrollment decreased, causing each score to carry more weight in final totals.
Further, DUHS’ curriculum and master schedule have been in a state of flux while working with the Michigan Merit Curriculum, National Core Standards, SCOPE and ACT college readiness benchmarks.
At each grade level there is a bewildering array of alphabet soup — NWEA (Northwest Evaluation Association, a non-profit organization working alongside member school districts to create a culture that values and uses data to improve instruction and student learning); MiBLSi (Michigan’s Integrated Behavior and Learning Support Initiative funded by the Michigan Department of Education, Office of Special Education and Early Intervention Services to help schools develop schoolwide support systems in reading and behavior); PDCA (plan-do-check-act), a four-step management method used in business for control and continuous improvement of processes and products; and DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, a database for schools and districts to enter and report on student performance results.
Here, a football fan would find that Red Zone means at-risk students.
The goal of Reading Recovery is to dramatically reduce the number of first-grade students who have extreme difficulty learning to read and write and to reduce the cost of these learners to educational systems through early intervention.
Short-term intervention has proven highly successful, and Dowagiac is in on the ground floor, with Katrina Daiga one of a relative handful of teacher trainers in the state.
Reading Recovery provides one-on-one tutoring.
It is most effective when available to all students who need it and it is used as a supplement to good classroom teaching.
Individual students — and one was singled out and chronicled as a “case study” to illustrate his remarkable improvement — receive a half-hour lesson each school day for 12 to 20 weeks.
As soon as students can elevate themselves to grade-level expectations and demonstrate they can continue to work independently in the classroom, lessons discontinue and new students begin individual instruction.
Reading Recovery began in the United States in 1984. Since then, approximately 75 percent succeed.
Follow-up studies suggest most Reading Recovery students also do well on standardized tests and maintain their gains in later years.