Notes from Title I Parent Advisory Council Meeting

John Ritzler, Executive Director, Research & Evaluation was the presenter.  Below are my notes from the meeting, which reflect my opinion and not that of SBCSC or the Marquette PTO.

• Perley went from being an A school to an F in one year (how flukey of a system must we have if the evaluations can go from top to bottom in one year)
• Previously there were issues for schools having to meet different standards under PL 221 (state law) and AYP (No Child Left Behind – Federal law)
• PL 221 used to have a matrix that accommodated high performing schools (ok that they didn’t have huge improvement) and low performing schools (they were given credit for big improvements even though achievement wasn’t meeting standards yet), once Indiana applied for waiver from NCLB, we went to letter grading system (A-F schools) and that matrix went away
• One potential issue is that only ¼ of schools in Indiana can show high growth in a given year (this is because the stats are normalized/measured against other schools in the state that year)
• Not sure how long the waiver from DOE (so we don’t have to comply with NCLB) lasts
• For Primary Centers, only 3^rd and 4^th grade students take ISTEP so: the letter grade assigned to the entire school is based off of two main components
• Test results of the 3^rd and 4^th grade students (think of this as the baseline)
• The individual improvement/change of the 4^th grade students from last year’s test results (this is segmented several ways, so the performance of students in the bottom ¼  of all students can impact the top ¾ etc (think of this as assessing progress/improvement and modifying the baseline from there)
• (this is obviously problematic especially in a school with a transient population – if 25% of your third graders are new to your school this year, they still make a huge difference in your test results), but this is nonetheless how the public and gov’t view your school!
• There was some controversy when the State Board of Education revised PL 221 to adopt this letter grade system because some said that they changed the standard so much from the original law that it was outside of the original intent of the legislation.
• There may be legislation introduced to force the state Board of Education to revise PL-221 now. 
• We need to “broaden the conversation about what constitutes a quality school”

Other Notes: 

• Use neighborhood locations other than the school to have parent meetings
• Tear down the barriers to parent involvement
• This group is formed specifically for Title I schools by why limit involvement to only Title I schools?
• Participation at the meeting was weak - each individual school needs to take more accountability in ensuring that someone from their school attends.
• Glenda Ritz platform for accountability includes no single letter grade, statistic measuring the percent of students mastering standards and statistic measuring the percent of students making growth
• We were asked to review the Parent Involvement Policy and make comments at the May session.