The school board that hired the testing company must answer to disquieted community members, and the testing company is faced with probing questions from the school board itself.
The testing program in question is STAR Assessments, a program owned by Renaissance Learning. According to the product’s website, it is the “most widely used assessment in K-12 schools.”
Winnetka primarily used STAR to measure Student Growth Percentile (SGP).
“We implemented STAR three years ago as a committee effort,” Trisha Kocanda, superintendent of the Winnetka Public Schools District 36, stated at the board’s Dec. 15 meeting. “We have been working with STAR to understand what this data tells us.”
The school board members are not the only ones focused on the test results. Community member Katie Scullion, who has been involved in the district’s strategic planning, said that community members have also been paying attention to the performance data after a “controversial math curriculum” was adopted a few years ago.
“[The school board] promised that they would consider how student performance went following the implementation of the curriculum,” Scullion recently told North Cook News.
When the STAR data was presented to the board and community in September, however, several discrepancies were uncovered.
The board and community members found multiple problems with the data presented by STAR. In addition to providing some numbers that didn’t add up, the STAR statistical analysis failed to set a benchmark for help evaluating the significance of what falling in a certain percentile means, which makes understanding the results difficult.
Additionally, Scullion pointed out that when the first data was presented in September, STAR failed to report the median SGP.
Scullion sent out an email on Dec. 11 alerting community members that the district had withheld some information from the public. The information discussed in the email indicated poorer performance results than the district’s STAR data had presented.
In response to the email, the board issued a press release, reiterating that it did not purposefully conceal STAR testing data.
“We strive to maintain a high level of transparency in all aspects of our work, and most especially, regarding the topic of student growth and achievement,” Kocanda said in the press release.
Scullion told North Cook News that she never intended to accuse the board of “purposefully” withholding information.
“All we did was ask for the release of the information," she said. "I don’t know if it was purposeful, if it was a mistake, or if there were any other factors at play. I never stated a reason.”
In response to growing concern both from the community and within the board itself, the board members called a work session on Dec. 15 to discuss the STAR test results and to provide the public with complete information.
“We thought that this was a positive outcome — they apologized for the September presentation, and we are glad that they responded to our request for full information,” Scullion said.
The board requested that a representative from STAR Assessments attend the Dec. 15 meeting to explain the data and its discrepancies.
“We asked questions, and continue to do so, until it came to a point that there are too many questions,” Korando told the board during the Dec. 15 work meeting. “The more questions we ask, the more confused we became, because we were seeing different answers… . That process was frustrating at best.”
Laurie Borkon, Renaissance vice president of Educational Partnerships, spoke before the board and public, and explained that the data’s problems occurred because of a technical problem with the data’s window, or the period of time in which the data was collected.
“Winnetka had inadvertently set their alternative SGP window in the software instead of a default window,” Borkon said. “We figured out this problem because your superintendent and (data analysis person) pushed and pushed and pushed and pushed. They said, something isn’t adding up. And they were right.”
Despite hearing from STAR’s vice president, after the Dec. 15 meeting, Scullion remained unconvinced of the program’s sufficiency for Winnetka schools.
“I’m a little surprised at this presentation,” Scullion said in a public comment during the board meeting. “STAR is not looking like the company for us…. It seems insufficient to have kids spend this much time taking the tests, and for us to not know how to read the data. We should know what is going on.”
Scullion offered an alternative to STAR: MAP testing.
“MAP is used by 600 districts, and our neighboring schools, and they can benchmark," she said. "I worry that we are throwing a system out there without having enough information about how the system is supposed to be used and what the quality of the system is."
Korando closed the meeting by saying that the board will reconsider its contract with STAR.
“Given what we have learned today, and the upcoming discussion that we will be having with STAR, we will have to determine if it is actually a useful use of our students time," Korando said. "If it is deemed not, then we need to have a plan in place as far as what can we do in place of it. We are not committing to anything as far as changing, but we are committing to look at this.”
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