Tecumseh Public Schools students in K-8 surpass math and reading benchmarks
TECUMSEH — Tecumseh Public Schools children in grades K-8 are scoring much higher in reading and math than the benchmarks set forth for them.
Director of curriculum, instruction and assessment Meghan Way reported on the progress students made during the 2021-2022 school year at last week’s board of education meeting. The district is required by the state to report on K-8 performance but not high school.
This year’s assessments were new to the district, but the district’s consultant for the assessments said students were making solid progress. There are four assessments: one in reading and one in math for grades K-4 and one in reading and one in math for grades 5-8.
The students take the assessments at the beginning, the middle and the end of the school year. The benchmark for growth set for the middle of the year was 50% and for the end of the year it was set for 75% growth.
Tecumseh kids surpassed that type of growth with all students achieving 83% growth in reading and 84% growth in math by the middle of the year and 91% growth in reading and 92% growth in math by the end of the year.
Another part of this requirement is to break the data down into subgroups.
“We look at our economically disadvantaged students, we look at our special education students, Hispanic and Latino, two or more races, and white. There are other subgroups like Asian or African American, but if we have less than 30 students in those subgroups, we don’t report on that publicly because it’s too identifiable,” Way said noting that each subgroup was within the range of the overall student performance. “We reached our goal of about 75% in all areas in all subgroups. We were very excited about that. We definitely exceeded that 75%. We were very excited to see this growth.”
Because it was the first year for these particular assessments, Way was unable to compare the data to last year’s performance. Each district chooses its own assessment so there are no district-by-district comparisons.
Tecumseh's curriculum associates representative "said that this is significant growth, particularly in a COVID year, where students were coming in and then they would be gone for long stretches of the year or the whole class might be out doing distance learning," Way said. "So they were very impressed with our growth.”
This year’s assessments will grow into something more in coming years. The district will be mining the data to make improvements overall but also at the individual level.
“I think something we’ve been talking a lot about is we want to be really digging deep into the data. We want to be specific in identifying students, especially coming out of a pandemic, that have gaps in learning. And we’re becoming much more strategic in how we view that data to make sure we’re supporting students,” Way said. “So we’re expanding our assessment next year to high school. All ninth through 12th graders will also take this assessment, which will be new for us. We’re excited to have more data and one of our main goals for next year is really to dig deeper into that data and get teachers more training in how to interpret the data.”
This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Tecumseh Public Schools kids grades K-8 surpass benchmarks
