Saline Scores All As and a B on Education Report Card

It was all As and a B for Saline Area Schools on the 2011 Michigan High School Report Card released Monday by the Michigan Department of Education.

, ,  and elementary schools and achieved an A rating in the final Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) reports. , earned a B rating and failed to make AYP. Saline Alternative High School did not receive a grade.

Steve Laatsch, Saline Area Schools Assistant Superintendent for Instructional Services, said scores are reflective of the excellent work done in the district.

“Our scores, in general, reflect the really great effort put forth at Saline Area Schools,” Laatsch said.

The B rating at the high school sticks out like sore thumb, however, especially when one considers that Saline High School was earlier this summer. The high school’s rating fell because a subset of students — those with learning disabilities — failed to show improvement on the math tests.

Laatsch said that the subset of students generally performed about as well as they did last year. But to make AYP, the district needed students with learning to disabilities to show significant improvement.

“We’re going to need to look at that and devote more time to meet that standard. It may involve more co-teaching strategies or more math classes,” Laatsch said. “We have the ability to review which students didn’t meet the standard and to work with them so they improve.”

Laatsch said the gap between students with learnings disabilities and without disabilities grows as students age, and that Saline Area Schools needs to do more to close that gap. It’s a challenge in any year, Laatsch said, and even more so when districts have fewer financial resources.

“It is difficult for students who struggle with basic reading, writing and mathematical skills to pass these tests. We certainly need to push as hard as we can we can for students to achieve at a higher rate. We are operating in a time when resources are tight and there are higher classloads for special education teachers,” Laatsch said. “We need to be aware of critical areas and try to keep class sizes down, but it is challenging. The passing of the county-wide special education millage certainly helped.”

The challenge will continue to be fierce. Laatsch said that by 2014, the federal No Child Left Behind legislations demand that school districts bring 100 percent of children to academic proficiency.

The failure to make AYP has no financial implications for the district—yet. The high school would have to fail to meet AYP several times before it faced losing some federal funding.

Laatsch noted the high school has failed to meet AYP in the past, adjusted and improved.

No Child Left Behind requires that Adequate Yearly Progress be calculated for all public schools, for each school district, and for the state. The school or district must attain the target achievement goal in reading and mathematics or reduce the percentage of students in the non-proficient category of achievement by 10 percent. A school or district must also test at least 95 percent of its students enrolled in the grade level tested for the school as a whole and for each required subgroup. In addition, the school must meet or exceed the other academic indicators set by the state: graduation rate for high schools of 80 percent and attendance rate for elementary and middle schools of 90 percent. These achievement goals must be reached for each subgroup, such as students with disabilities.

Overall Michigan schools saw a 7.1 percentage point decrease in students making AYP, dropping from 86 percent of schools in 2009-2010 to 79 percent in 2010-2011. 
Michigan high school students showed significant declines in the percentage of high schools making AYP, going from 81.9% last year to 60% this year. 
Jan Ellis, spokeswoman for the MDE, suggested the drop is the result of increasing proficiency target amid growing academic expectations. She said every time the state increases the target by 10 or 12 points, especially in math, there tends to be a group of students on the cusp, that when the scores increase, they just don't make it.
She said the math targets, for instance, had not increased for three years in a row, giving some students a chance to start to catch up, then they jumped significantly this past year, which put students behind again. 

"We are raising the bar on what they need to know, to also raise AYP simultaneously is very, very difficult," she said.

Ellis said the state is awaiting word on whether the federal government will give Michigan a waiver on meeting proficiency targets in the next 10 years as it works on boosting overall academic performance. 
She said that will allow the state to balance yearly progress with the increase in rigor in schools in Michigan are facing as the state adopts Common Core Standards.

"We want to raise the rigor of what students know, rather than lower the bar," she said.

Common Core Standards, essentially means setting specific goals for what students need to know in each subject. For instance, what exactly students should know in each grade/subject to have a clear understanding of it.

This, Ellis said, will better prepare students for college and career paths, make them reading to take the national assessment test, boost ACT scores and give a better understanding of what they are being taught.