Monday, October 1, 2018

Framing the Right Numbers

In spite of the continual rain, the school year has gotten off to a pretty good start. Granted, we have dealt with some significant challenges that forced our fourth and fifth grade students to be displaced for a week. Oh, and at the writing of this blog we still have water coming in the agriculture room (did I mention the continual rain?). Luckily the carbon monoxide issue we had to contend with last week was a relatively quick fix and only caused a minor inconvenience. But nonetheless, spirits are high and most folks seem to be full of #piratepride! 

A lot of that can be attributed to the success we are seeing from our fall athletic programs. In many ways, this kind of feels like a repeat of last fall (except for the rain of course). The football team remains undefeated and ranked number one in the state, and both the volleyball and cross country teams are ranked and are having very memorable seasons. If you have been keeping up with these successes, you probably have seen some very impressive statistics being posted in the newspaper. Many of  these numbers are quite startling!

While we are tremendously proud of these accomplishments, it is important that we don't forget about the most important numbers, statistics, and successes of all. Those numbers being the ones that measure the success of our students. I have just recently updated our student achievement data numbers and would encourage you to go check them out on the 'About Us' page of our school website. If you scroll down about halfway through the page, you'll see the Hudson Community School District Report Card for the 2017-2018 Academic year. 

For the most part, I'll leave it to you to examine these data points in more detail, but I'll just point out a few highlights. Take a look at page 3 of the Iowa Core Report. This graph depicts the average score by grade level from grades 3-11 in reading. The green bar is district growth, blue for our AEA, and orange depicts state. At almost every grade level, our district is outperforming peers at both the AEA and statewide level. If that isn't impressive, take a look at page 6 of the same report. In this graph, you can see how our proficiency rates compare to our peers. I would invite you to pay particular attention to how high the proficiency is for grades 9, 10, 11. The science scores that were posted are just as outstanding. If you take a look at page 8 of the same report, you can see how much higher our proficiency scores are compared to our peers. 

At the end of the day though, perhaps the most important metric is how much growth students have made from one year to the next. You see, a student can be proficient while at the same time showing very little growth from their original starting point. This same report offers the growth of each grades cohort. Once again, these numbers something to be proud of!

The 'About Us' page of our website has a lot of information about our school district including the students achievement data described above and much more! I would encourage you to take a look at these numbers. At the end of the day, how our students perform in the classroom is the most important metric of them all! 

Now if it will only stop raining!




 

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