‘We have to confront the brutal facts’
Greenwich students didn’t make the district’s 2023 reading, math goals
GREENWICH — Greenwich students improved on the math portion of the Smarter Balanced Assessment last year, but when compared with the district’s goals for student achievement, their scores don’t look as good.
Fewer students hit their personal growth target in math and English than the district anticipated.
Board of Education members set their goals for exam results in February, when they voted on the overall district strategic plan. From predicting how many students should be reading at grade level, to estimating how many students should be meeting their personal growth target on the SBA exam, the BOE made goals that students ended up not meeting last year.
A student’s personal growth target is based on how they performed the previous year on the SBA and includes the number of points the student should gain on the exam the next year.
On the English portion of the exam, 52.4 percent of the third through eighth graders that took the SBA last year met their personal growth target. The BOE goal predicted that the number would be 63 percent.
For math, the BOE goal predicted that 60 percent of the students would meet their target, but only 57.3 percent of the students ended up meeting it.
BOE member Laura Kostin recently said that since the board created the goals a month before students took the exam, the board “didn’t really have a direction to provide to our educators” when it came to the targets students should meet on the test.
“A month before (students) were taking the test (the BOE members were) like ‘Bam. (Students) need a 90 (percent),’” Kostin said.
Kostin added that, when compared with the 2021-22 school year, she sees “growth in the number of kids or percentage of kids who are meeting their growth targets on (English Language
Arts) and in math on the SBA.”
Two years ago, 50.6 percent of third through eighth graders met their personal growth target on the ELA SBA exam compared with the 52.4 percent from last year. On the math exam, 55.7 percent of the third through eighth graders met their target two years ago, but last year it grew to 57.3 percent.
“We have to confront the brutal facts,” said BOE member Michael-Joseph MercantiAnthony. “We set targets in the strategic plan and our students made progress. By and large in all of these metrics, we made progress. We fell short of most of the achievement targets in year one of the plan.”
Not only did students not meet the BOE goals for their personal growth targets, fewer students are reading at grade level than the board predicted, although the difference was slight. The goal was to have 77 percent of third through eighth graders reading at grade level last year; the actual number was 76 percent.
Tom Healy, Central Middle School’s principal and the sixth through eighth grade social studies coordinator, said principals are going through teacher goals and “those meetings right now are actually looking at that dataset and saying ‘OK, this was not where we wanted it to be. Why?’
“Then we start to think about what happened last year and then again from working with our coordinator team, we’re able to look at trends across schools but also within the schools and look at teachers ourselves, and see where there might be a positive trend, where there might be a flat trend and start to try to dig into the instructional practice,” Healy said.
Marc D’Amico, chief officer of K-12 curriculum and leadership, told the board that district administrators will continue to work to ensure student success grows.
“I don’t want anybody that works for the Greenwich Public Schools to think we don’t value their efforts because teaching is a really hard job,” D’Amico said. “These scores are what they are. I will make no excuse for where we are underperforming. We need to do better. So we are not satisfied with several of the key numbers that came across but that’s the purpose of having strategic plans that are highly focused on school actions that are vertically aligned.”