Sterling schools revamping student proficiency goals

STERLING – The Sterling Public Schools Board has announced its goal to increase the district’s student proficiency ratings by almost 20% over the next three years.

Sterling Public Schools Superintendent Tad Everett said SPS has been changing its approach to student success and goal setting ever since Lincoln Elementary School and Challand Middle School both received “targeted” Every Student Succeeds Act designations in 2017.

“That was a gut punch for us as an organization, but even more so for me as a leader,” Everett said during an interview with Shaw Local. “The realization that we had two schools underperforming academically really started our transformation.”

Everett said that before 2017, SPS measured student success using localized assessments, including how many students were enrolled in Advanced Placement and dual-credit courses and the student graduation rate, which Everett said still stands at 90%. However, ESSA assigns those designations based on, in part, what Everett calls a “highly debatable subject” – standardized testing.

“There’s some people in education that firmly believe in standardized testing and the value of it,” Everett said. “Then, there are others who say it has no value whatsoever. They say it’s a measuring stick based on a test in high school that means nothing to the value of your life and what you’re going to achieve.”

ESSA, a bipartisan measure that President Barack Obama signed into law in December 2015, is the reauthorization of the 50-year-old Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the country’s national education law. ESSA tasks individual states to create a plan to ensure every child is learning and on the path to college and a career.

ESSA replaced the No Child Left Behind Act backed by former President George W. Bush in 2002 and uses four summative designations to identify how a school’s students are performing: exemplary, commendable, targeted, and comprehensive and intensive. According to the Illinois Report Card:

• Exemplary schools are ranked in the top 10% statewide, with no student groups underperforming.
• Commendable schools have no underperforming student groups, a graduation rate above 67% and performance below the top 10% statewide.
• Targeted schools have one or more student groups performing at or below the level of the overall “all students” group in the lowest 5% of schools.
• Comprehensive schools fall within the lowest 5% of schools in Illinois, along with any high school with a graduation rate of 67% or lower.

“Right or wrong, we were using different assessments that indicated our students were doing well academically,” Everett said. “Then, all of a sudden, the ESSA data comes out and says you’re not doing as well as you thought compared to other schools.”

Since then, Everett said, SPS has continued to use its localized assessments but also began placing more emphasis on the influence of standardized testing on its ESSA designation.

“If the state and federal governments are going to use standardized testing, we can’t ignore it,” Everett said. “So, we’re giving more weight and value to standardized testing while still focusing on our students’ college and career readiness. We want to say that students attending our schools are above the state average. That is our goal.”

Since the 2017 designation, Everett said all SPS schools have received “commendable” designations.

“When you look at student achievement, you’re really looking at three things,” Everett said. “What you teach, how you teach it and how you determine if they learned it. We’re aligning all three of those things to state standards, and it’s really been paying off.”

Now, SPS is continuing its upward trend by revamping how it sets and evaluates the success of its goals by moving from measuring them annually to every three years.

“Instead of having all these goals that you go an inch deep, mile wide with, we’re doing the opposite,” Everett said. “We’re going deep and narrowing that focus. Instead of trying something and looking at it every year, we’re giving it time and measuring that success every three years.”

SPS’s goals call for improving student proficiency rates across various subjects by 2027. SPS plans to raise the percentage of students scoring proficient or excellent on state English/language arts assessments from 26.3% in 2023 to 45% and on math assessments from 21.2% to 40%. Additionally, it aims to increase the percentage of kindergarten students demonstrating math readiness from 9% to 25%.