Dunsmore explains school performance results
By Phyllis Moore
Published in News on November 13, 2016 1:06 AM
Principal Tammy Keel and her staff at Mount Olive Middle School were celebrating the school reaching expected growth last year.
But then came the word from the state -- the school was a low-performing school.
"I cannot tell you how disappointed we were," she said at a recent gathering. "We were better than that and we knew it."
The school had made consistent progress, she maintained, exceeding expectations most years.
"We regrouped and we went to work," she said. "We chose not to accept that we were labeled a low-performing school because we were so much better than that."
Mount Olive Middle School was among schools in the district last year with the highest growth, the principal said, coming in within one point of being a "C" school instead of the "D" it received.
"The staff was literally teaching as if their hair was on fire," she said.
As a result, this year the school came off the low-performing list.
But when the latest state results came out, the district still had 13 low-performing schools -- Brogden primary and middle schools, Carver, Carver Heights, Dillard Middle, Eastern Wayne elementary and middle, Goldsboro High, Grantham Middle, Rosewood Middle, North Drive, Southern Wayne High and Spring Creek Elementary.
It is something Wayne County Public Schools is taking a hard look at, says superintendent Dr. Michael Dunsmore.
"The state looks at the yearly test scores so they have thresholds and they look at a performance score, which counts as 80 percent, and then they look at growth," he explained. "So even if schools are meeting growth and their performance scores aren't where they need to be, they get slammed.
"The state says if you're considered not up to the standards they want three years in a row, you're considered a low-performing school. That triggers a lot of supports and other things from the state that we can take advantage of, not to get on my soapbox but it's not a good accurate assessment of what's actually going on in the schools and what our children are doing."
In an example like Mount Olive Middle, the disparity between the growth measures is challenging.
"You're telling teachers that they've got to do more than a year's worth of growth. That's what we strive for all our teachers to do," Dunsmore said. "It's kind of an unfair assessment when growth only counts as 20 percent of the overall score. You can have a kid that just tanks the test."
One of his concerns, he said, is the time lost recently following the storm. Schools were closed for eight days after Hurricane Matthew.
"That's the one thing we can't get back from the hurricane is the stress and all those other things that play into taking these tests," he said. "Being on those lists, we don't want to be on those lists, but we also take advantage of the grants and the monies that we can go after to help support those schools and their efforts to get off the lists."
Options like the School Improvement Grants, are beneficial. The district recently learned it is the beneficiary of $2.6 million worth of funding for two five-year grants, to be used at Brogden Middle and Carver Heights.
"That enables us to get additional teaching support, additional materials, additional expertise to come in and work with our principals and staff to help them do better," Dunsmore said.
The good news may be in stark contrast to other recent announcements about the district, in the throes of launching efforts to build a new Meadow Lane Elementary School and other facilities projects.
But the two areas -- facilities versus school improvements -- derive funds from completely different sources.
"The commissioners have nothing to do with that," Dunsmore said of the latter. "The commissioners primarily are capital monies, buildings, grounds, maintenance."
School improvements come from federal sources.
"The state and the local are out of this," Dunsmore said. "So we've going above and beyond because we met those thresholds the federal government allows us to apply for those."
The perception of low performance is another hurdle the district has to overcome.
"It's not the teachers that aren't performing," Dunsmore pointed out. "The words we're using to describe it probably are the not the best words we should be using.
"They're just not meeting the expectations that we would like and because in the state of North Carolina, in the line item budget there's only certain things we can use that money for so they allot money based on our numbers and the needs. They don't give you any extra, even if you're working with struggling populations. So we look at every areas we can gather money from."
He likened the situation to a household budget. There can be money allocated for certain things but the minute an emergency comes up, "you figure out how to get the money for what you need to do," he said.
"I'm not going to sugarcoat it, I'm going to be critical of the General Assembly," he said. "The General Assembly has changed the rules, they changed the rules at the last minute.
"I don't think they changed the rules putting our students' needs first. I think they put the political needs first."
Dunsmore said some of the existing problems go back to the federal No Child Left Behind legislation, when more stringent test measures were put in place along with the expectation that all schools would reach 100 percent proficiency.
"That mindset really changed how we're assessing things," he said. "You don't become low performing in one year.
"So when we get our scores from last year and we had schools on the low-performing list, we put some initiatives in place and we saw some great things happen. It's one of those things, you put your finger in the dike here and two more leaks pop up."
Just as a child's report card is an indicator that more work must be done, so the district is looking at what needs to take place to get the 13 low-performing schools off the state list, and keep all the schools from being on it in the future.
"The data that the state looks at is a three-year snapshot, so in all fairness we saw great gains from last year to this year," Dunsmore said. "(A school) is still considered low-performing because she has one good year but still carrying along those two bad years from the two years prior.
"If she has another good year this year, she's got two good years and one bad year and that's when you'll start seeing that pendulum swing."
Help is definitely needed, the superintendent said, but on balance educators, principals and the administration are receptive to support and initiatives for improvement.
"People see those test scores and they listen to how it's being described," he said. "You've probably heard me say, we let far too many people speak to our message. The political arm speaks to how horrible public education's doing. I disagree with that.
"Are we where we need to be? Absolutely not. We've got a tremendous amount of work to do but there's a lot of great things going on."
The district will continue to make efforts -- hiring and retaining quality teachers, providing them with support and resources like professional development -- that will make an impact.
"We have to move the needle," Dunsmore said. "And we have to start showing some gains."