Case
Student Growth Percentiles

With teachers being evaluated on student growth now, it is common to hear teachers and administrators claim that having a lower achieving class is to a teacher's benefit because these students are able to show more growth. However, when the students have learning disabilities, processing deficits, and other health impairments, is it still fair to say that these teacher have an advantage. I am concerned about having the inclusion class this year because of the student growth percentiles measuring these students described above on completely different content year to year does not appear to be advantageous. What measures should be taken to ensure that these students will grow across grade levels with differing content? I teach in a district that does not administer benchmarks and in a grade level that does not assess with SLOs. My student growth percentiles will be measured solely on performance on the 3rd grade GA Milestones compared to 4th grade GA Milestones.

Posted on: 10/16/15 | Views: 847
Solution #1
Top Solution
In order to be certain your students will see growth you need to be monitoring it during the year, not just with the Milestones at the end of the year. Just because your school or grade doesn't have anything in place to monitor it doesn't mean it isn't possible to monitor. You need to assess the students that you feel have the largest deficits to see where their specific deficits are. Then create probes to address the specific deficits. When using the probes, if you see progress, great, if not, dig deeper to see if there are any other deficits that are keeping them from progressing.

This is a useful solution

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Solution #2
Since your district doesn't administer benchmarks, it might be worth it to sit down at the beginning of the school year and map out where your students should be at different points in the year. It may give you a better idea of how things are going mid year.
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Solution #3
One solution that you can do to aid in ensuring that your students are growing is to set up your tests so that they are comprehensive as you move through your course. By making your tests/assessments comprehensive this ensures that students are maintaining their knowledge of content throughout the course, and you can remediate as needed based on the data from the assessments.
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