Tonight's the Night!

Tonight is the culmination of over two and half years of our literacy advocacy work. The District will be reviewing changes they made in response to our work to bring the Science of Reading to TESD. We want to provide you with some guiding questions around TESD’s presentation so that you can participate in tonight’s meeting.

While the presentation left us with many questions, we are hopeful that those questions will be answered in the narrative accompanying tonight’s presentation. It will be easy for our administrators to answer these questions because they have been trained in the SOR and are highly skilled at analyzing student data to drive curricular decisions. We believe our board, who has committed to bring the SOR to TESD and making sure ALL kids will become proficient readers, will ask similar questions because these are obvious questions to people familiar with the SOR.

Below are some of the slides from tonight’s presentation with our accompanying questions. You can find the entire presentation here.

We are very excited to hear tonight’s presentation!

Slide 3

Slide 3 Questions

1. Why did TESD choose to not implement one of the proprietary data systems that accompany benchmark tests. e.g., Acadience?

2. Does Powerschool have a method for determining the rate of growth for students like Acadience’s Pathways to Progress? If not, how do you determine of a student is making adequate progress from year to year?

3. How does Powerschoolhelp administrators and teachers make literacy decisions?

4. Do you have any examples of reports that the administrators and teachers use from Powerschool?

5. Are the diagnostic assessments done with students in reading intervention housed in Powerschool? Are they shared with parents?

Slide 6

(Annotated using Acadience National Norms)

Slide 6 Questions

1. Why did you develop your own graph instead of using the premade tools within the Powerschool platform?

2. Where are the metrics that show the students’ performance compared to national peers and district peers? Example Here

3. What does the 4Sight data tell parents? What does the ORF tell parents?

Slide 9

Prescribed Benchmark Schedule from Acadience

Prescribed Benchmark Schedule

Slide 9 Questions

1. Why do we only do benchmarks for K-4?

2. Why don’t we follow the prescribed benchmark schedule from Acadience?

Slide 14

Slide 14 Questions

1. How has the process of using this data been going, e.g., is it easier to analyze data than with the previous methods?

2. What does the process in the district for data analysis look like?

3. Do you have examples of the reports you use to aggregate student data? Will you be presenting them to the board?

Slide 25

(Annotated using Acadience National Norms)

Slide 25 Questions

1. Can you help me understand what these triangles mean?

2. What does the performance in the green look like? How many kids are at the 90%ile, 80%ile, 70%ile etc.?

3. Does it make sense for such high performing students to have benchmarks set at such low %ile’s?

National %iles for TESD Benchmark Cut Scores

(Green part of triangle would be this %ile and above)

Norms from Acadience National Norms

Slide 31

Slide 31 Questions

1. What did you learn about the educational needs of the students in the district? Will you present this information to the board?

2. What were the weaknesses of the previous curriculum?

3. What were the weaknesses of the Reading Support Curriculum?

4. How did you incorporate the input of The Reading League and PaTTAN? What is their response to your implementation of a literacy program guided by the SOR?

Slide 32

Slide 32 Questions

1. Can you explain the phonemic awareness scope and sequence? What does the instructional block look like for each one?

2. Will parents be able to get a copy of the scope and sequence for their child so that they can support the development at home?

3. What do the explicit instructional routines look like for phonemic awareness, phonics?

4. Can you explain what the writing curriculum looks like? How is it different from our current curriculum? Are there benchmarks?

5. What changes will be made to Reading Intervention? Will there be a decision tree?Have the Leveled Literacy Intervention and Intervention by Design curricula been retired?