It’s the big game and the score’s tied, with less than 20 seconds left on the clock. This is a true make-or-break moment, the culmination of countless hours of practice, drills, conditioning, and collaboration with your team. It has been a tough game, and everyone is exhausted, but your rival makes a key mistake and suddenly you have the ball in your hands.
You smile to yourself, because when you look out across the court, you see your teammates are perfectly positioned for a play you’ve run a hundred times in practice. Your team executes the play to perfection and the shot goes in just as the game clock hits zero.
The crowd goes wild!
And now it is time to celebrate. This is an opportunity to publicly recognize the accomplishments of the team, take pride in your hard work, and reward your efforts.
It was a close game, the coach says, and we deserved that win, but we also got lucky. Remember this feeling at practice next week, and then next time they won’t stand a chance against us.
Celebrating School Performance With ESSA
Sports wins are highly visible displays of success, which makes them easy to recognize and celebrate. School districts, though, have a longer season, work harder, and make a greater impact, so why don’t we celebrate those wins more often? Recognizing and rewarding both individual and team efforts within your district are a great way to inspire even more success!
One of the big areas where every school wants to see victories is the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). Compliance and improvement for our districts can be seen through the results of the ESSA annual assessments.
What does a successful ESSA assessment look like?
ESSA’s core tenet is to bridge the achievement gap for traditionally underserved demographics, like children with disabilities and English (as a second language) learners.
If we are to make strides in lifting up underserved groups, an annual assessment isn’t enough. We need to know what the achievement gap looks like at the beginning of the year, then monitor the effectiveness of our actions to reduce the gap, just like a sports team meeting for practice and running drills. The final assessment, much like a highly publicized game, is how we show the payoff of all our efforts.
School Success and the MDE Grades Report
On a more local level, the Michigan Department of Education (MDE) releases their annual school grades and ranking to show both performance and district comparison.
The following indicators used in the MDE system summarize school performance and growth:
Student Proficiency. A measure of student scores based on the state assessment, the percentage of students scoring high enough to be considered proficient.
Student Growth. The percentage of students demonstrating adequate growth, as measured by the state assessment.
Graduation. The percentage of students graduating from school, with different calculations for graduation after four, five, and six years.
Performance Among Peers. Student proficiency compared to 30 similar schools, with peers defined as those that have similar percentage of students receiving free lunches, percentage of students with disabilities, and total enrollment.
English Learner Progress. The percentage of students who are English learners and are showing adequate proficiency or growth on the state’s English learner assessment.
Assessment Participation. The percentage of enrolled students who complete the state assessment and receive a valid test score.
On-Track Attendance. The percentage of enrolled students who are not chronically absent.
Student Subgroup Performance. Subgroups of students, as they compare to corresponding state proficiency averages.
There is a lot of overlap between ESSA and the MDE list, but for both standards of success, “what gets measured gets managed.”
If your district is looking at this data throughout the year, the natural result is to work toward improvement, which ends in a win for the district’s state assessments and rankings.
Improvement Measures Turn Into School Wins
When you receive the same score year after year, it becomes the status quo and any celebrations become rote. When the district works hard to make improvements, and see a visible reward for their efforts, the victory is much sweeter.
To create a school report worth celebrating, you need to implement improvement measures.
Fortunately, some of the work has been done for you! With the Michigan Integrated Continuous Improvement Process (MICIP) application, the state has provided a framework for assessing the whole child and creating improvements for student outcomes.
The MICIP platform data is prepopulated for needs assessments, and the actions align with compliance requirements, to ensure that your strategy has the greatest impact on your school’s scores.
However, any district can make measurable improvements throughout the year. How can we identify the most meaningful actions?
Leverage Your Data for District Performance
If you aren’t analyzing your data throughout the year, you may be in for a surprise when federal or state assessments analyze it for you. It’s better to be proactive about understanding your district’s performance. Analyzing your district’s data gives you the power to identify weaknesses early and take appropriate action.
With Eidex, we understand the hassles of data analysis, getting stakeholder buy-in, and completing improvement projects. We want to make it easier for you. That’s why we’ve built data analysis platforms for a hassle-free way to assess your district, and automatic reporting and visualizations for communicating your needs to all stakeholders.
When your team works together to implement improvements, they’ll see the tangible result of their actions as they have reliable data to establish a starting point, ongoing progress, and final tally. Eidex FOCUS and PRISM take data you’re already collecting and transform it into actionable insights, so you know your strategy encompasses the most results-producing actions.
Eidex FOCUS can give you meaningful peer comparisons at the click of a button. With FOCUS, you can identify achievement gaps between students, and elevate those who are falling behind. This enables you to be proactive about monitoring and elevating your underserved student groups.
Plus, you can connect PRISM to MICIP with our built-in module for the MICIP application. By adding PRISM data sources, your continuous improvement projects can help your team find even bigger wins to celebrate.
With Eidex, You Have More Wins to Celebrate
School performance reports are inevitable. You can proactively position your district with Eidex data analysis so there will be no surprises at the annual assessment – only improvements worth celebrating.
We’re happy to show you how your district can make improvements with Eidex FOCUS and PRISM, just let us know when you’re available for a free demonstration.
If you have any questions, or want to know more about connecting PRISM and MICIP, let us know by calling us at 844-512-3282 or filling out our contact form. We’ll walk you through all the ways you can leverage your data for continuous improvement!