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The CMS Board of Education met last week and continued its deep dive into some literacy scores for kindergarteners, first-graders, and second-graders.
K-2 students take early literacy assessments — known as DIBELS — at the beginning, middle, and end of each school year in order to monitor progress. The school board has set a goal to increase the percentage of K-2 students meeting their DIBELS benchmarks from 67% as of 2023 to 91% by 2029. It has separate sub-goals for each grade and each year.
The latest beginning-of-year scores are in — and while they don’t paint a full picture of progress, they help show how far the district has to go to reach those goals.
I wrote about this back in November when the board first unveiled this data and honed in on kindergarten scores. Here was the gist:
- 52.1% of K-2 students met their benchmarks in their beginning-of-year tests this year — up about 1.6 percentage points from last year.
- If students improve at the same rate they improved by last year, district officials can estimate about 72% of K-2 students will meet those benchmarks on their end-of-year tests.
- That would put the district behind on its goals — the district has set a goal number for this school year of 75%. So educators need to accelerate the rate of improvement to stay on pace.
In November, the district focused on the kindergarten numbers: The percentage of kindergartners meeting their beginning-of-year benchmarks dropped this year, meaning the district will have more ground to make up with those students.
But last week, the district honed in on the data for first and second-graders. By contrast, those numbers are on an upward trajectory. The percentage of first and second-grade students meeting their benchmarks ticked up by 3.3 and 2.3 percentage points, respectively, this year.
But, in keeping with the overall theme here — those improvements are still lagging behind the rate needed to meet the district's end-of-year test goals of 76% in first grade and 70% in second grade. Specifically, the district will need to accelerate the rate of improvement by 2.4% among first graders and 0.9% among second graders.
Breaking out the scores by student subgroups also paints a complicated, but promising, picture.
The longstanding gaps between some of those groups still persist — only 53.4% of Black students met their beginning-of-year benchmarks, for instance, compared to 75.1% of white students and 81.2% of Asian students.
CMS officials say they're confident that the district can boost performance.
Superintendent Crystal Hill discussed the district’s strategies — including its systems of support for students, which create different pathways for students who are not reaching their benchmarks. She told the board last week she's confident the strategies are working.
“Our ability to accelerate now, our strategies, are much more stronger than they would have been two years ago,” Hill said.
But, she also discussed some barriers. One of the district’s high-dosage tutoring providers recently shut down. Nearly 20% of schools have indicated they need tutoring support. Hill also called attention to the fact that less than 70% of the district’s master teachers, or advanced teachers who mentor other teachers, have participated in required professional development. She said that's a “problem that we’re addressing.”
