December 4, 2020

Honey-Do List- December

December 20 - Fall Trimester Grading Window Closes (grades K-5, K-6, K-8)

December 24 - January 4 - Winter Recess

January 18 - Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday

Pollinating Ideas 

Double Jeopardy:

How Third Grade Reading Skills and Poverty Influence High School Graduation

Annie E. Casey Foundation

• About 16 percent of children who are not reading proficiently by the end of third grade do not graduate from high school on time, a rate four times greater than that for proficient readers.
• For children who were poor for at least a year and were not reading proficiently, the proportion failing to graduate rose to 26 percent.
• For children who were poor, lived in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, and not reading proficiently, the proportion jumped to 35 percent.
• Overall, 22 percent of children who lived in poverty do not graduate from high school compared to 6 percent of those who have never been poor. 
• The figure rises to 32 percent for students spending more than half of their childhood in poverty.
• Even among poor children who were proficient readers in third grade, 11 percent still did not finish high school. That compares to 9 percent of subpar third-grade readers who have never been poor.
• About 31 percent of poor African-American students and 33 percent of poor Hispanic students who did not hit the third-grade proficiency mark failed to graduate. These rates are greater than those for White students with poor reading skills. 
• But the racial and ethnic graduation gaps disappear when students master reading by the end of third grade and are not living in poverty.

Pushy Principal 

• It has been brought to my attention that some people feel as if Lexia and STMath are being pushed heavily
• I know Art and thanks for noticing (This is one of my favorite lines from National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation)  I use lines from the movie a lot around this time of year. 

Lexia

• When it comes to Lexia it is a research-validated part of a blended learning strategy that has proven effective for students. I have linked a study here. 
• Lexia should be part of a blended learning strategy. We have not yet provided professional development opportunities for teachers to fully-integrate the program. 
• Therefore at this time, it is not expected that we are taking full advantage of the program. 
• Lexia is not intended to systematically teach phonemic awareness or phonics. That remains the job of the teacher. 
• Lexia is intended to be an extra dose of those skills and an opportunity to independently practice, 
• Given the times we find ourselves in, I rushed getting it into your hands so that students would have a high-quality, research-based, asynchronous resource to use. 
• Even without the integration into daily instruction and the active review of data to plan lessons the program could provide gains in supporting our students on their reading journeys
• In order for any gains to be realized students need to at least be meeting their weekly dosage. 
• The highest dosage is 60 minutes (12 minutes a day of active participation on the platform)
• I am pushing the dosage and would like to see more of our students working on grade-appropriate skills. 
• There have also been questions about how a student was placed in the program. 
• If you are interested check this page about auto-placement out
• Please do not reset a student or manually change a student's placement without talking to me
• I can see cases where we may want to have students retake the auto placer in grades 2 and 3

STMath

• ST Math is new to us but is not new in many other parts of the country
• Based on a successful 1 year MCAS study DESE has identified it as a promising program. 
• ST Math has reduced language demands which results in students being able to experience higher levels of success without the demands of language slowing them down. 
• Check out the data here and read some of the other state reports if you feel like being a data nerd like me
• As with Lexia, the success of STMath is dependent on the usage and completion of puzzles at grade level. 
• It is a high-quality asynchronous math resource for our students and we should be using it to its full potential. 

Report Cards 

• The grading window for this crazy trimester closes on 12/20.
• We will continue to use the District Report Card that is in Aspen so that report cards can be emailed to families
• IEP Progress reports need to be completed at the same time as the report cards
• We will not hold parent-teacher conferences until the week of January 11th. 
• I would like us to think of a creative way that we can take our conferences to advance our anti-racist work through mutual goal setting and collaboration for the second half of the school year.  

Health Metrics

Mayor Walsh and Chief Martinez announced a new metric to measure COVID-19 infection rates in Boston after weeks of reviewing data and out of a commitment to reporting data that most accurately reflects Boston’s positivity rate
The new metric accounts for new positive cases out of all tests during the time frame reported (90 days)

• This will more closely report the positive rate in the city for the reporting period because it measures all positive cases against all negative cases
• The City was previously taking a person-level approach looking at a cumulative time frame that looks back to the beginning of the epidemic - that meant each person tested was counted only once since the beginning of the pandemic, even if they had repeated testing
• That didn’t give an accurate picture of the current infection rate because it only counted new positives but not new negatives
• The new metric is a hybrid between person-level and test-level positivity and will exclude college level testing due to their high rate of testing on campuses
• This is one of six metrics that the City reviews, including:

• New Positive Tests for COVID-19 in Boston Residents: This tells us how many new cases we’re seeing each day and how quickly COVID-19 is spreading in Boston
• Number of COVID-19 Molecular Tests Performed: This helps us to understand whether we are performing a consistent amount of testing among Boston residents.
• COVID-19 Emergency Department Visits to Boston Hospitals: This metric looks at the broader impact of COVID-19 on hospital emergency departments. This number is a representation of the overall impact of COVID-19 on hospital emergency departments.
• Availability of Adult ICU and Adult Medical/ Surgical Beds at Boston Hospitals: This tells us how many inpatient beds are open at hospitals to treat patients.
• Percentage of Non-Surge Adult ICU Beds Occupied at Boston Hospitals: This tells us how full our Boston hospital adult ICUs are and indicates when hospitals may need to start using surge beds to care for patients.

Google Chat 

• We have disabled Google Chat for all students given the students' lack of responsibility and kindness when using the feature. 

 

Student Awards 

• Here is the link to check out who is receiving awards this week 
• I do think I will do a K video and a grade 1-3 video again. I just have not split the script yet, 
• Though we are not awarding certificates for time spent on the usage of Lexia 54% of our students met the usage requirements over the last 4 weeks. This is a decrease of 6% over last week's 4-week average however it included Thanksgiving week.
• From 9/1/20-12/4/20, We have increased from 30% of our students working on grade level material to 35% working on grade-level material
• From 9/1/20-12/4/20, We have increased from 2% of our students working on above grade level material to 7% working on above grade-level material

• 27% of our students met their Puzzle Requirement in STMath. This is down 1% from the week before thanksgiving

ESL Observation

• I am late to the table of getting my SEI Endorsement on my principal license. It is one of those things that you don't need if you are a superintendent or working in a central office. (fun fact)
• As part of the RETELL for administrator class, I need to observe classrooms to see teachers using SEI strategies. 
• Does anyone want to volunteer?