Grades 6-8 FCAT Data

Grades 6-8 FCAT DataSmith Middle School

Good Afternoon, Thank you to everyone who was able to attend this months PTA meeting and those who are taking the time to watch at home. Today I wanted to share with you how our students are performing on FCAT and discuss with you how we can work to increase the number of our students who scored at proficiency or above1

Before we start I want to make sure I say thank you to all of our faculty and staff as well as our students. We have really shown a lot of improvement across the years with our students and it shows in our data.2

When looking specifically at Reading and Math. We can see that the number of students who fall at proficiency or above has increased from 2007 to 2011 across all grade levels. About 60% of students have scored at proficient or above consistently across the years and in Grade 6 the number of students has increased quite a bit in reading and math from 2007 to 2011 in grade 7. However looking at Grade 8 the number of students at or above proficiency consistently falls below that of Grades 6 and 7, in some cases that difference is more than 20%. This led to the leadership teams decision to focus on grade 8 in the coming school year3

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When looking at our most recent data, 2011, we saw the the discrepancy between grade 8 and the other grades was very clear in math. There was a difference in 23% between grades 7 and 8 and a difference of 28% between grades 6 and 8. So we decided that we are going to tailor of focus to not just grade 8 but specifically Grade 8 Math4

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It also became clear to us that our focus needed to be on Math for Grade 8 when looking at a comparison between our school and the district. We scored 25% less in Math compared to only 8% less in Reading. It has always been our goal to fall between 12 percentage points of the district, so while reading falls within that range math does not. So this solidified for us the need to focus on math.5

Our goal is to increase the percentage of students at or above proficiency on the Grade 8 Mathematics FCAT from 40% in 2011 to at least 50% in 2012.

Strategies determined by leadership teamVertical PLCsSurvey Teachers for Professional DevelopmentFocus for Math CoachProgress Monitoring Common AssessmentsData ChatsTime for Response for Intervention for Math

The leadership team spent a lot of time with this data and we have come up with some new strategies to try to achieve our goal.We will implement vertical PLCs, so that teachers in all grade levels can share strategies that work and those that dont so that we can improve our practice as teachers. We will also provide a survey to teachers on professional development in order to determine if teachers need more content knowledge. We will also make our math coach more available to these teachers and we will implement progress monitoring checkpoints by using common assessments across classes. This will then be dissected by teachers and the leadership team in Data Chats and will serve as a way to group students for response to intervention time, where we will give students more small group math instruction, as it has been done in reading. We are hopeful that these solutions will help us to achieve our goal.7

As we continue on our journey toward achieving our goal. I will continue to update you on our progress because we all work individually and collectively, to ensure that our students learn the skills grow and learn as our future leaders, which relates to our core values of excellence.8