Palatine Community Consolidated School District 15 recently issued the following announcement.
At its Sept. 12 meeting, the Board of Education heard a report regarding the achievement gap that exists in District 15, and how the Department of Instruction plans to address it.
The Department of Instruction defines the achievement gap as students who are in the lowest achieving 25 percentile in second grade nationally on the English Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) exam, and stay in this bottom quartile through eighth grade.
This definition is a non-traditional way of looking at achievement gap. The department did not want to make assumptions regarding specific subgroups, but instead wanted to see how the district impacts students district-wide. The study included a nine year span of student data who stayed in District 15 from grades 2-8.
The study revealed that there is no correlation between race, school of attendance or native language when identifying students who fall in the achievement gap. Instead, factors that contributed included low oral language proficiency, long-term English language learners (ELLs), and poverty.
Moving forward, the Department of Instruction has a variety of interventions and strategies that are already in place or will soon be implemented:
- Ensuring a guaranteed and viable curriculum across all schools in the district. This is the assurance that specific content is taught in all courses and grade levels, regardless of classroom or school in District 15.
- Increasing access and opportunity for students in things like accelerated math, multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS), instructional coaching, and culturally & linguistically responsive teaching methods.
- Increasing oral language proficiency through new curriculum and teaching strategies.
Original source can be found here.
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