Principal's Message April Edition 2011

Dear JHS 13 Community,

We are now 1 day away from the ELA exam and 9 days away from the Math exam. In school days, we are 7 days away from the Math. I have spent the last month meeting with teachers and visiting their classrooms. I have been investigating our knowledge of students as far as a low, medium, and high level students. My research into this area is to confirm we are taking the time to get to know our students. I am also making sure we are aligned on our vision of what each level of student looks like.

Some of the conclusions I have been able to make are the following: our school is not aligned on what we believe to be the different levels of students, many of us are basing the leveling on the amount of effort a student puts toward their subject area, using effort is not an accurate assessment of the levels of our students, and the amount of work we are giving our students does not necessarily give us many opportunities to see various levels of thinking.

Our data for the past few years has indicated that our medium level students improve the most compared to the low and high (our lowest level students come in a close second to our medium level students). Our highest-level students either stay the same or drop. Where does the breakdown occur that our highest-level students do not excel under our roof? I believe it is how we assess our students and determine if we have challenged this population. If we solely use work ethic as a measurement for achievement, then our highest-level students will continue to get straight A’s and do poorly on their state assessments. For instance, in math, if we give students 15 problems of similar skill work, and the high level student completes them…does that necessarily mean he or she is a high level student? If a student does not complete them, does that mean he or she is a low level student?

Let me be clear about one thing. I do believe the students who are committed to completing in class and homework assignments should be rewarded. I do not believe it should be with a grade or test/quiz score that does not represent how much they have actually comprehended. In addition, I do not believe students who do not complete homework or in-class assignments should necessarily fail because the work was not complete. I believe we need to adjust what we think teaching is. We can clearly state that teaching is not the delivery of information, the offering of the opportunity to apply the information we give them, and the completion of the work that involves the application of the information shared. Teaching is imparting skills or giving your students the tools to determine the relevancy of information, identify patterns, expand on concepts, explore their world, investigate their conjectures, and make educated predictions. Most important part is we give them the opportunity to think not memorize steps.

The key to great teaching is assessing. I do not mean giving whole school tests once a month. Its about measuring progress with tools that give us the clearest idea of what our children are comprehending and what kind of support they need to improve their learning. It is taking a close look at all of our students on an individual basis as many times as possible. You need to look at the whole class to see if the lesson was successful and then you need to look at the individual students to see if the students have learned the skill(s) you hosted in the lesson.

Conferencing and small formative assessments are the most efficient way to find out what our students know and how we can develop their thinking. These assessments will quickly decipher the different levels of students. You will see that their ability is most likely not congruent to their effort. In fact, many students who do not exert much effort are going to have a wide range of levels. It is imperative these assessments have questions of all levels of Bloom's Taxonomy favoring the top of the pyramid with questions pushing analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating.

It is important for us to have a clear understanding of our students. By only collecting assignments and marking questions right or wrong, we will barely know anything about our students. We will not have thorough knowledge of what our students are capable of. We need to look closer at the answers we are getting. If we are not getting a written response then we need to get a verbal one. We need to work with our students and generate the clearest picture we can get. The workshop model, student portfolios, data-driven instruction, and ongoing student feedback are essential for success with this transition. The administrative team will continue to support in these areas while helping staff take a closer look at their students.

Our goal is to raise the achievement level for every student. Looking closely at our students and their work is the key to teaching and, most important, student learning which directly affects their achievement level. Let's work together to drive this work forward.

Sincerely,


Jacob T. Michelman

CHECKING IN WITH THE SCHOOL GOALS

20% Increase of Students Achieving Level 3 or 4 on ELA State Exam and 15% Increase of Students Achieving Level 3 or 4 on the Math State Exam

The Cabinet has been working diligently to generate ideas to improve student achievement. Our latest initiative was to convert the 37.5 Minutes from Homework Help to Skillbuilders. We dedicated three weeks to ELA with grammar and mechanics along with recording information from a read-aloud. Administrators walked around and so higher student engagement and more teacher participation. We will be infusing math for the next few weeks. In addition, we put together our 6th Saturday Academy. We used Acuity and various test prep materials to expose the students to what they will see on the state exams. The final Saturday is next week where we will be assessing the students to see how helpful the Academy was.

Other initiatives that were put together to help better prepare our students were the stations in the ELA classroom addressing the weakest areas of our students. Mr. Rej used Acuity in his technology classes where students are reinforcing the work they are doing in their regular ELA classrooms. The Acuity work identifies the questions the students did not get right on the periodic assessment in January and provides additional questions and guidance tto similar answer correctly. Finally, the Academic Intervention Services that City Year and our Regis Interns have been providing for our students has been giving our level 1 students additional support to improve in both ELA and mathematics. Regis students have been tutoring students in mathematics while City Year has been doing Read 180 and Rewards.

We have done a tremendous job preparing our students for the state exams. We will use our data to determine the strongest initiatives and eliminate the ones that had little to no impact. This will drive the work we do next year in preparing for the state exams.

92% ATTENDANCE

Our daily average continues to fluctuate between 88% and 93%. The highest number of students absent in the month of April was 32. Unfortunately, that number of students absent gives us an 88% attendance for the day. Our latest data shows over 61.8% of our school falls in the 90 to 91% attendance group. Our second highest, with a total of 19.4%, are our students with 80 to 89% attendance. This population continues to directly affect our efforts to reach our goals. We have focused our initiatives on the 80 to 89% by giving as many of the students as possible a contract to make it clear how many absences they have left and the repercussions if they are to use all of those absences. We have seen a positive impact from the contracts but our students with the worst attendance have not shown any improvement.

We have recently signed up for "Wake Up New York City." This initiative has a phone service where famous people such as PDiddy and Carmello Anthony have recorded messages for our students to hear when the call is answered. These services will be directed to our students who have high absences and/or lateness. Also, we will be setting up our list of students in Attendance Court during our next two Attendance Meetings. We plan to have 15 students signed up and starting the program over the summer. We hope by the time school starts for next year, the students and families would have met with the judges as least once.

As for the entire staff, please continue to encourage students to attend school. Always, always, always make our students feel welcomed by meeting students at the door, noticing something different about them everyday, praising students when they make good decisions, encouraging students to make smarter decisions rather than ridiculing them when they make bad ones, etc... You are the key to students wanting to come to school. Please use that power and help our students get to school.

CITY-WIDE SURVEY ACHIEVING “ABOVE AVERAGE OR HIGHER” ON ALL 12 CATEGORIES

The School Improvement Team finalized the three year strategy plan. As mentioned in the previous Principal’s Message, we have started the assessment process to identify gaps in our communication. We are nearing the end but we are still working on fixing our communication with parents and students. Our parent communication committee has identified the School Messenger system as a productive method. They have also identified our mailings as one too. It is clear that our “backpack” method is not the best choice but they understand it has to be used once in a while. If we set up School Messenger to let parents know that a letter or notice is being sent home when we “backpack” letters, we could potentially strengthen that method.

On May 2nd, the School Improvement Team shared the overview of our three year plan with staff. This coming Monday they will finish presenting and, once again, offer staff an opportunity to provide feedback. We will have to give one more survey by June 17th to assess our progress in addressing the areas identified in the city-wide survey.

EXPANDING INTERVENTIONS TO PROVIDE ADDITIONAL SUPPORT FOR 15% OF OUR POPULATION

We are almost finished with completing the Functional Behavior Assessments and Behavior Improvement Plans to the 20 students with the most reported discipline issues. The Child Study Team received professional development on Behavior Intervention Plans. We will be meeting with teachers to review the plans to make sure they are implemented as soon as possible.

In addition, we will be connecting the guidance at-risk identifiers with the Child Study Team referrals so that we can expand on the number of students receiving at-risk counseling. By setting up student goals for at-risk counseling, we will be able to focus our support with individuals so the core issues interfering with their learning are addressed. We expect to have this plan complete by Memorial Day Weekend and sharing it out with staff during one of our staff development half days or full days.

Finally, we will be sharing an improved version of our discipline code with staff on May 5th after school. We have provided more suggestions for interventions with the classrooms. We have also added more direction for level 1 patterns in the classrooms. The ladder has been clarified even more on the new plan and accountability has been strengthened. All of these adjustments will result support our school goal because there will be a clear level of when a child should be referred to Child Study, one of the biggest pieces that has been missing in our discipline code. This way, additional support can be provided to even more than our initial goal of 15% of the student body.

Please continue to work hard toward our Destination of Excellence!
One School, One Future!