Despite an overall accountability rating of “meet expectations,” the Lakeland Union High School dropped one category after the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction dinged the school five points on its 2015-16 report card for not testing sufficient numbers of students in a sub-group.
The state's education department placed Lakeland in the unfavorable “meets few expectations” category for that reason. Director of Curriculum Robert Way told school board members Monday that the drop was not a true indication of the school’s achievement. “The school report deduction of five points is huge and in reality due to a very small data point located in one sub-group inside one sub-category buried under one area of student engagement,” his written report states. Lakeland had a 95.3 percent overall participation rate for the ACT test given to juniors last year. Way said the testing participation goal was reached for all sub-groups except for students with disabilities, where 20 of 22 students (90.9 percent) were tested. “So if LUHS would have tested one more student with a disability, then we would have been rated as meet expectations instead of meets few expectations.” The five-point deduction and a later “adjustment” by the state of two-tenths of a point resulted in Lakeland scoring 62.9, a hair below the “meets expectations” cutoff of 63 points. Without the deduction and adjustment, Lakeland would have had a 67.9 score, placing it well within “meets expectations” category. The school did score 66.4 on its 2014-15 report card, with no point deductions for testing percentage.
Board member Barb Peck said the report was “disturbing” in that the public would only perceive the ranking and not the reasoning behind it. Way said he questions “the validity of our overall score, which leads me to question the validity of the DPI’s report card system.” “Make no mistake, we have work to do,” he said, explaining they need to increase the school’s mathematics achievement score, as well as continue to “narrow achievement gaps with Native American students, disabled students and economically disadvantaged students.”
Board President Tom Gabert said the board would provide the teaching staff whatever resources it needed to improvement the ranking. Way said they intend to lobby students and parents to show why it was important that everyone takes the tests. There are four overall accountability ratings: significantly exceeds expectations, 83-100; exceeds expectations, 73-82.9; meets expectations, 63-72.9; meets few expectations, 53-62.9; and fails to meet expectations, 0-52.9. The state grades schools and districts in four priority areas: student achievement, student growth, closing gaps, and on-track and postsecondary readiness.
The LUHS report card showed some strength. Its 92.5 percent graduation rate was higher than the state’s 90.6 mark. Lakeland’s closing gaps category, which measures how much the achievement gap between subgroups of students and traditional students is shrinking in school, was higher than the state’s -- 62.9 to 60.7. However, Lakeland’s student achievement score of 60.6 lagged the state’s 63.6 mark. Within that category, Lakeland’s English language arts achievement score was 32.9, nearly on par with the state’s 33.1 average.
Its mathematics achievement score was also behind the state’s -- 27.7 to 30.5.
