District SLC Grant – Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 1

The Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) recently submitted a five year, $5 million grant proposal to the US Department of Education (DOE) to support the creation of Small Learning Communities (SLCs) in all four high schools (See here for post re. grant application). While the grant proposal makes mention of the two smaller SLC grants the district received earlier, there is no examination of the data from those two projects. One would think that DOE would be curious to know if MMSD’s earlier efforts at creating SLCs had produced the desired results before agreeing to provide further funding. Furthermore, one would think it important to examine if the schools implemented the changes that they proposed in their applications. It is my intention to provide some of that analysis over the course of several posts, and I want to encourage other community members to examine the Memorial grant proposal and final report and the West grant and final report themselves.
We begin by examining Memorial High School’s SLC grant which was funded from 2000-2003. Memorial’s SLC grant is a good place to start, not only because it was the first MMSD SLC grant, but because they lay out clearly the outcome measures that they intend to evaluate and their final report provides hard numbers (as opposed to graphics) over a number of years before and after the implementation of the SLC grant. Memorial had two goals for their SLC grant: 1) to reduce the achievement gap and 2) to increase students’ connectedness to the school.
Examining student achievement suggests mixed results for Memorial’s restructuring. Student GPA’s indicate a slight narrowing of the achievement gap for African American students and essentially no change for Hispanic students when compared to their fellow white students over the period of the grant.

Difference Between
2000
2001
2002
2003
White & African American
1.35
1.35
1.16
1.24
White & Hispanic
0.75
0.87
0.74
0.79

Student WKCE performance can be considered an external indicator of student success, and these data indicate no change in the proportion of students scoring at the Proficient and/or Advanced levels, an especially noteworthy result given that the criteria for the WKCEs were lowered in 2002/03 which was the last year of the grant. I’ve included data up through this past school year since that is available on the DPI website, and I’ve only presented data from math and reading in the interests of not overloading SIS readers.

WKCE 99/2000 2000/01 2001/02 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 2005/06 2006/07
Reading                
African American
45.09
54.90
36.00
33.00
40.5
45.8
42.9
29.8
Hispanic
63.16
80.00
47.00
54.00
53.6
51.7*
53.1*
29.3*
White
93.33
85.55
86.00
89.00
90.2
86.2
89.0
84.2
Low Income
53.33
56.36
36.00
36.00
32.9
40.7
43.7
25.7
Not Low Income      
88.00
86.9
84.7
89.8
80.2
Math                
African American
18.00
27.45
20.00
29.00**
39.2
32.2
27.3
39.4
Hispanic
42.11
40.00
33.00
49.00
42.9
62.1*
59.4*
36.2*
White
77.44
76.48
68.00
90.00
89.7
89.3
89.0
86.4
Low Income
18.64
16.37
16.00
29.00**
29.4
38.4
38.7
35.7
Not Low Income      
90
85.8
86.9
89.2
84.2

* note. data for Hispanic students includes 4 Native American students in 03/04 and 2 in the following two years
** note. DPI actually reports higher percentages of students scoring proficient/advanced: 34% and 37% respectively for these two cells
The data from DPI looking at ACT test performance and percentage of students tested does not suggest any change has occurred in the last 10 years, so the data presented here would suggest that Memorial’s SLC restructuring hasn’t had any effect on the achievement gap, but what about the other goal, student connectedness?


Memorial’s final report presents data on student suspensions and expulsions as their quantitative indicators of student connectedness. It should be noted that in their grant proposal, Memorial was going to examine student responses to the annual climate survey as a way to track students’ sense of belonging and relationship with the school, but, regretfully, that information isn’t presented. When we look at the information we are provided with, there appears to be no change, but DPI data suggest that things have declined in recent years: suspension rate the year prior to the grant (99/00) – 4.3%, suspension rate last year of grant (02/03) – 6.1%, suspension rate for most current year’s data (05/06) – 10.2%. The picture is the same for student expulsions: 99/00 – 0.20%, 02/03 – 0.23%, 05/06 – 0.6%. Data from DPI also suggest that there has been no change in attendance rates or in the percentage of students habitually truant.
The goals of the District’s SLC proposal are admirable. However, this data does not suggest that the Memorial model will produce the desired results. Next time we look at West.

7 thoughts on “District SLC Grant – Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 1”

  1. Thank you for your labors, Jeff. I will be most curious to see your analysis for West.
    No one challenges the district’s goals. It’s their untested methods and high-handed implementation that makes many of us uneasy (and a few of us downright furious).

  2. Perhaps there are other improvement indicators to note. Any improvements in graduation rates or attendance rates?

  3. Feel free to explore the DPI WINS Data site: http://data.dpi.state.wi.us/data/graphshell.asp?Group=Race/Ethnicity&GraphFile=HIGHSCHOOLCOMPLETION&STYP=9&DETAIL=YES&CompareTo=PRIORYEARS&ORGLEVEL=SC&FULLKEY=023269040360&DN=Madison%20Metropolitan&SN=Memorial%20Hi&TQSUBJECTS=SUMALL&TQSHOW=LICSTAT&RelateToTQS=EconomicStatus&DISABILITY=APD&HSC=REG
    There you will find that graduation rates for African American students peaked at 82.5% for the last year of the grant, but the graduation rate has declined every year since then. In 2005/06 the graduation rate was 70.1% for African American students at Memorial versus 69% at West, 63.9% at East, and 81% at La Follette. The attendance data looks better. Memorial’s minority attendance is higher than the other high schools in the district, but all four have had small declines over the last 3 or 4 years.,

  4. Jeff,
    The problem with this analysis is the WKCE test changed in the middle of this analysis and so did the principal at Memorial. Bruce’s style may be significantly different than Pam’s and the “environment” change could be due to more calls to 911 or who dealt with problems in- house. The fact that an educational institute did not use data or evaluation to support their position is nothing new, as almost all educational ideas that have been instituted to our curriculum, and even architect have been instituted without research data to support the position. (have you seen the open-concept building at Jefferson!) In my graduate studies in biomedical research, the education department was always the target of poor research jokes!

  5. Mary,
    I realize that the standards for the WKCE changed over the period of time that the above data are presented. However, the criteria for the different levels of proficiency were lowered in 2002/03, so we would expect that there would be an increase in the percentages of students scoring proficient and advanced simply as a result of that revision. The fact there there wasn’t an increase makes the data especially notworthy.
    Your point about administrators having different standards for contacting the police is an important one to keep in mind. Some teachers would suggest that the amount of problem behavior has actuallly increased in our high schools because administrators, mindful of how suspension and expulsion data reflect on a school, are not enforcing rules to the same extent as they did in the past.
    Regarding the absence of statistics, just read the final report of West High School’s SLC grant. Not only are there no inferential statistics presented, but there aren’t even any descriptive statistics presented. The data is presented as a series of crowded, difficult to read, Excel charts. It’s enough to make you scream…at least I want to scream every time I look at the report…and Bruce King got paid $36,000 to evaluate that project.

  6. It seems like every ‘reform’ that MMSD has tried they’ve done so without much conviction and without much research. SLC’s have been tried in other places, they don’t work by themselves, and they won’t work here in Madison unless a considerable amount of effort and thought goes into how these SLCs will be different (if anyone wants different) from the conventional system.
    Students in small groups will not result in better graduation rates, grades, attendance, suspensions, until the students are engaged in their learning and teachers are given the professional responsibility to address the individual needs of the individual students.
    It’s not just the structure of school that has to change, it is the way we view education, what we expect of an education, and the opportunities we give students to achieve their highest potential.

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