BOE to review Advanced Learner program
The school board will finally hear back on an audit of the Advanced Learner program that was requested in December, following the proposal to expand the Very Strong Needs program at Lincoln Academy.
Gongshu Zhang, executive research and accountability officer, said he was still revising the report but the findings/recommendations should be the same. His goal was to fulfill in the report Walter Child's following requests:
1. Scores and progress being made within the existing program
2. Comparisons regarding VSN versus AL at the home schools
3. Issues around race and socioeconomic breakdown in terms of participants within the program and any obstacles to entry into the program that may exist
4. Number of students tested in by a private testing service as opposed to testing in by their end-of-grade scores
5. Show how VSN students ultimately did in high school and post high school, that is following the progress or charting forward the progress of the participants in the VSN program
6. Chart the progress of the participants in the VSN program in high school and post high school
Zhang was able to do some of that, but he could only track a cohort of 6th-graders from 1999 to get their SAT scores. The report is a starting point.
Missing from the report are the actual numbers of the students being compared in 2005-06, so it's hard to do your own number crunching. You definitely need Zhang to decipher this report so I'm not sure how much public value it will have as a stand-alone.
I asked Zhang if he had compared the EOG performance of minority and low-income AL students to non-minority and middle-class non-AL students. He said he might look at doing that in the future. (One of the reasons I asked was because of his SAT score examination which found that black students from higher-income families still scored less than poor white students.)
What do you get from the report? Anything missing?
Comments (5)
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Dr. Zhang and the AL Staff members have obviously expended a great deal of time and effort to analyze the effectiveness of the Advanced Learners programs offered by GCS. My understanding is that trying to compare the performance of students that participate in the AL programs with students that do not participate is like trying to compare apples and oranges. Dr. Zhang was required to gather sufficient data to be able to statistically change the oranges into apples so as to make an apples to apples comparison.
There are several findings in the report but IMHO two stand out.
First, the differences in the number of students found eligible for AL programs from the different ethnic/socioeconomic groups is due to achievement differences among high performers and not to a systemic bias in the eligibility criteria or selection process. Achievement determines eligibility.
Secondly, and most importantly, eligible students that do participate in AL programs significantly outperform their peers that do not participate as measured by both EOG and SAT scores. Eligibility confers no advantage without participation.
While it is important for GCS to continue to nurture academic and intellectual potential in students from underserved populations, thereby increasing the number of students eligible for AL services by closing the achievement gap, it is as equally important to encourage the existing eligible students to participate in the demonstrably beneficial AL programs with a goal of closing the "Participation Gap".
Posted on April 25, 2007 11:44 AM
Jwg,
I understand Dr. Zhang and others spent about two months working on this report. However:
1) The report does not specify if the testing non-AL control group was made up eligible students or not. It just says top-performing and one can't assume a student who performed well during one testing year would qualify for AL, although it is likely.
2) Because no raw numbers are provided, one cannot tell the numerical difference in the eligible vs. participating AL student body. We could be talking 50 people or 100. So then, how do we know how much attention the district should pay to increasing the number of participating students. Are we talking 100 non-participating students or 700? The 2005-06 AL enrollment numbers were not listed. I asked for current disaggregated data for some of this but was not able to get it by deadline. However, I understand that the AL coordinator is gone and data was limited. So we shall see what direction the school board goes in based on this information.
Posted on April 25, 2007 4:37 PM
Morgan,
1) I *think* that it would not matter if the students were eligible or not, only whether they were participating or not, if the point was to test the effects of participation. Prior presentations have shown that (approxmately) for every 10 students that move up from level I/II to level III/IV within a grade, 8 students move from level III/IV down to level I/II the next year. So there is a lot of mobility within student rankings. I don't know how this affects AL eligibility/participating reporting.
2) The only participation numbers explicitly available in the report are at the Very Strong Needs level - 267 participating out of 321 eligible, roughly 83% (up from the 81% number used by Dr. Becoats in the recent staff proposal to move 101 VSN students to Welborn). VSN is a little different in that students may choose not to test and therefore drop back into the Strong Needs group. I agree that a table of the numbers of eligible/participating students by AL program by grade by ethnicity/socioeconomic class would be helpful.
Looking at some of the charts, however, there does appear to be a "Participation Gap" relative to the ethnic composition of the programs (the percentage of students participating is not proportional to the percentage of students eligible). Given that there are almost 13,000 AL students (eligible or participating - we don't know), even a 10% nonparticipation rate may be considered significant by some. Perhaps a future study can determine why this potential "gap" may exist?
As to some of what's missing:
This report looks only at one side of the AL program - students' performance. It does not look at how well/poorly the Plan for Advanced Learners (http://www.gcsnc.com/al/index.html) as repeatedly approved by the BOE has been implemented on a school by school basis by the GCS administration.
Please let us know how the discussion goes as the BOE meeting conflicts with the Academy at Lincoln's Spring band concert and most VSN parents will be unable to attend.
Thanks!
jwg
Posted on April 25, 2007 11:27 PM
GCS website appears unavailable due to non-payment of domain name fees. Josey, this is a story.
Posted on April 26, 2007 1:57 PM
Joe, I just went to the Web site and it is fine.
Posted on April 26, 2007 4:32 PM