In June, Bethlehem Area School District administrators selected Broughal MS for a Comprehensive Support & Improvement (CSI) plan, based on the school’s three-year average of math and English Language Arts (ELA) scores on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) tests administered annually to eighth-graders. Broughal’s CSI plan, using $545,000 of Title I federal funds, encompasses three main areas: culture and mindset; instruction and assessment; and professional development. Today’s final installment about the CSI plan looks at the results from the school’s first-quarter ELA and math assessments, with additional commentary from Dr. Rosemary Hughes, director of school support at the Pa. Dept. of Education (PDE).

BASD has a commitment to share quarterly results with the Pa. Department of Education. These quarterly reports show whether Broughal has met the quarterly goals set during the summer, as well as describing barriers to achieving these goals. For this final article in the series on Broughal, the district shared its entire quarterly report to the PDE.

Broughal did not meet all of its milestones for the first quarter. However, where a goal was not met, barriers that stood in the way have been identified and addressed. Principal Rick Amato and his teachers gather and assess data at least weekly to change what’s not working and expand on what is working, to reach the school’s goals.

“There are three quarterly routines that we have to monitor,” Amato explains. The state wants ELA curriculum supervisor Kim Harper, math curriculum supervisor Mark James, grant administrator Jodi Frankelli, PDE regional supervisor Dr. Elizabeth Shotwell, Superintendent Dr. Joseph Roy, Chief Academic Officer Dr. Jack Silva, and Amato to sit down as a group to assess progress.

“The state has built a mechanism to say that the old school way of corrective action is not the way anymore,” Amato continues. “It’s about ‘Are you meeting your benchmark goals?’ and ‘How can we help?’”

Becoming data-driven

Being data- driven often sounds like jargon, but it’s a meaningful term for a school in corrective action. One of the priority statements the state education department gave Broughal to guide its efforts instructs the school to “align curriculum, assessments, and instruction to the Pa. standards.” As with every Pa. priority statement, the Broughal team created two goals – one for ELA and one for math – for this overall objective, with quarterly milestones to be met.

In order to teach all students grade-level material – without “dumbing it down” – teachers in ELA and math first had to gather data on what has been holding their students back from accessing grade-level materials. According to Amato, the children at Broughal are just as intelligent and cognitively capable as their peers at other middle schools, but they have skill gaps that needed to be identified, and then remediated.

Meeting the ELA quarterly milestone (“50 percent of teachers will use literacy strategies across the content areas by Sept. 30”) was hampered by delayed access to the ELA professional development program. Although Broughal implemented StudySync, an ELA curriculum aligned to Pa. standards, at the start of the school year, “Keys to Literacy” training for teachers did not take place until Oct. 14, which means that Broughal staff did not learn how to use comprehension routines until after the Sept. 30 quarterly milestone deadline.

“I don’t mind saying that we didn’t meet a goal, if I can explain why we didn’t meet it – the training started late – and report that we’re on track now,” Amato says. He and his team recognized the challenge they faced, and stepped up the use of the ELA instructional tools by incorporating some training into the regular “data meetings” with teachers.

In math, Broughal met its quarterly milestone, despite delays in receiving the Swivl teacher-recording cameras ordered by the district. Math consultant Jason Adair lent the school several Swivl devices to be used until the new ones arrived. Instructor Heather Newhard, who has been working on data analysis at Broughal, worked with the math teachers to develop strategies for holding students accountable to math norms, which are clearly posted in every math classroom.

Using instructor-

level data to drive math improvement

The second PDE priority statement directs Broughal faculty to “use a variety of assessments […] to monitor student learning and make adjustments to programs and instructional practices.” Although all students did not demonstrate 25-point growth on IXL math diagnostic assessments by Sept. 30 – the school’s quarterly milestone goal – many students did, and the team used the data from IXL to figure out why.

When the math teachers were trained on the use of IXL in August, they were told that the best way for students to improve their skills (and their scores) was to spend 15 minutes a day, one day a week, in the tool’s “diagnostic arena.” Most of the teachers employed this strategy for the first three weeks of school, with disappointing progress.

Amato and his team turned to the data to find out why. Teacher-level data from IXL revealed that some teachers – Christina Isernia, Michael O’Connell, and Michael Weiss – had better results than others. These teachers had taken a slightly different approach, having their students work on yellow-flagged “recommended skills” in IXL first, and only attempting the diagnostic arena problems once they had resolved their individual issues with the flagged skills. (In Part III of this series, we heard from one parent that her son voluntarily spends considerable time at home working on IXL problem sets, encouraged by one of his favorite teachers. Without realizing it, this student was one of the early beneficiaries of a positively differentiated approach.)

After learning this best practice from the teachers who initiated it, the other math teachers have incorporated it into their classroom routines, and Amato anticipates meeting the Jan. 8, 2020, milestone goal and reporting improved data to the PDE for the second quarterly report.

“Now our growth is much better,” he says. “We’re constantly checking it – all the time.”

Amato says he’s hoping to get some help from IXL Learning, the company that offers the math assessment tool, in pulling effective reports more efficiently. He explains that much of the analysis was performed in Microsoft Excel by Newhard, using exported IXL data. Amato asserts that all schools using IXL would benefit from improved data analysis within the tool, and he plans to work with the vendor to encourage the incorporation of this type of functionality.

First quarterly

ELA goal met

Broughal met its first quarterly milestone for ELA, administering the beginning-of-year benchmark to all students to determine the level of support needed by each student. This initial goal is the first step in accomplishing the end-of-year goal of decreasing the number of students needing intensive reading support by 6 percent.

Amato is confident in the outcomes-driven model being used. Assessments identify students who may need support, additional assessments are used to validate the support need, and the students are continually progress-monitored as they move through the nine-week skill gap-filling program.

Amato explains that in order for students with skill gaps not to fall further behind, as much remediation as possible takes place during the “what you need” (intervention or enrichment) segment of the school day.

“Our kids are still getting their core studies in ELA,” he said. “They’re not yanked out of class.”

During ELA classes, students can click on “scaffolds,” tools within the StudySync software to help them access grade-level reading material even when some missing skills make it challenging.

There are, indeed, challenges. Some students were assessed as reading well below the benchmark for their grade level. Any student scoring in the “red” zone (“well below benchmark”) on the Acadience assessment is further tested to determine exactly where the remediation should begin.

“For kids who were in the red,” Amato explains, “we started them off at a sixth-grade passage, and then we had to go through all the way down – testing them three times, then taking the median and the average of their scores – to find out the actual point where they began to struggle.”

Amato acknowledges that there will not be time to close every skill gap for every child. He refers to literacy scientist Dr. Hollis Scarborough, whose work at Haskins Laboratories in the 1990s and early 2000s included the development of a “reading rope” showing how word-decoding skills and language-comprehension skills are woven together as a child learns to read.

“These kids haven’t been through Reading by Grade 3 [the district’s early literacy program],” he explains. “Early literacy has a huge impact” on later reading skill development.

Aiming to hit the second quarterly ELA goal

The team at Broughal isn’t writing anyone off. From the students lagging the benchmark by one year to those with multi-year literacy skill deficits, everyone receives the appropriate level of support, which is continuously checked and validated through Acadience assessments.

For some of these students, it means going back to some of the basics of reading: awareness of phonemes and decoding letters into sounds. This can be a challenging proposition for pre-teens, because the instructional material used must be appropriate to both their reading level and their age level.

Broughal’s intervention material selection was informed by the insights of adolescent literacy researcher Dr. Tim Shanahan.

“If you have an eighth-grader reading at a third-grade level,” Amato says, “how do you give them something to read that’s on their level, that’s not babyish?”

Broughal is using the REWARDS program from Voyager Sopris Learning, developed by Dr. Anita Archer, Dr. Mary Gleason, and Dr. Vicky Vachon. The vendor’s website cites numerous studies testifying to the program’s ability to help “all struggling readers,” including English language learners, students with reading disabilities and “students who have simply fallen behind” to remediate literacy skill gaps.

Despite the sizable gaps for some students, Amato is adamant that no one is being pigeon-holed.

“You’re not tracked into an intervention group,” he explains. “You’re only in a group for nine weeks.”

And there is no blaming or shaming. The instructors at Broughal are honest and direct with the students about the work that lies ahead. Amato shares the team’s approach: “We say, ‘Somewhere along the way, we missed the fact that you couldn’t decode the words. We missed it. Whether it’s vowel teams, or silent E, or something else. So we have to work with you to train your ear and your speech sounds to close that gap. It’s going to look as if we’re looking at a word and breaking it apart.’”

The district is confident in this approach.

“REWARDS is one of the more research-based practices [among literacy interventions],” Amato says. “While the students are in that program, we’re progress-monitoring them. We will [assess] them over and over again, and keep moving them up.”

‘On a really

promising path’

Dr. Rosemary Hughes, director of school support at PDE, believes Broughal and BASD are on the right track to succeed in appropriately meeting the needs of every student.

“I believe that at the district and the school level, they really do have the strong foundation they need to lead this work,” she says. “They’re on a really promising path.”

The state’s approach to school improvement has changed since the early days of No Child Left Behind.

“One of the biggest shifts that we made when we rolled out our CSI efforts under ESSA [the federal Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015] is to view a strong partnership with the district as first step in this process,” Hughes explains.

The current administration’s approach, led by Pa. Education Secretary Pedro Rivera, is to view itself as a partner for schools and districts with challenges, rather than instituting a top-down, command-and-control approach.

“Prescriptive approaches don’t work,” Hughes says, “because the district and the school know their community better than anyone could.” It is that community understanding, according to Hughes, that is necessary to ground any decisions made about strategies in the best interest of students, families, teachers, building leaders, district leaders and community partners.

Hughes and her team see Broughal – and the leadership at BASD – as having three distinct advantages that position them for success.

“First,” she says, “is the ownership and the sense of urgency that the district leadership demonstrated in response to the [in need of comprehensive improvement] designation.”

She explains that the designation is not a punitive one, but “a signal that there is a need for a closer and more intentional partnership to train the district and the school.” She describes it as “the data signaling an opportunity to try to unpack the local needs and work together to create a strategy to address those needs.”

Hughes invited BASD Chief Academic Officer Dr. Jack Silva and Broughal Principal Rick Amato to Harrisburg to present the CSI plan at one of Secretary Rivera’s monthly meetings.

“It was clear at the start,” she says, “that the district shared responsibility for identifying what could be improved – not only in the short term, but what’s really going to set their system up for continued success in preparing students for success in college, career and community.”

Another asset at Broughal that Hughes wanted to highlight for her colleagues in Harrisburg is BASD’s “investment in more sustainable capacity-building through professional development for the school leadership team and for the classroom teachers, and the fact that that is where they have prioritized their improvement efforts.” In contrast to administrators tempted to resort to a “quick fix” to get out of corrective action, BASD and Broughal are building professional capabilities that will continue to deliver what students need, long after test scores have improved.

Finally, Hughes notes, “They’re not making excuses. If they identify a need that they don’t have the resources to meet that need, they seek out the partners that can help them creatively gain access.” Some of those partners are behavioral health professionals brought into schools to serve students in need of higher-tier social and emotional support. Others are community partners like Lehigh University, the Bethlehem Area Public Library South Side Branch, and the Hispanic Center of the Lehigh Valley, which help students access wi-fi and have a clean and quiet place to do homework.

Hughes has a positive view of the “spirit and culture” at Broughal.

“The authentic commitment of every member of that school community to figuring out what each individual student in that building needs to be successful, and then figuring out how to offer them those supports – it’s really motivating and encouraging,” she says. “From top to bottom, there’s a sincere investment and belief that every student can be successful if the system had better information on what each student needs, and actually worked to meet those needs and provide them with the support they need.”

Principal Rick Amato couldn’t agree more. He and his team at Broughal are fully committed to the goal of improving student achievement.

“You have to kick the soccer ball toward the goal,” he says. “If you’re not kicking, you’re not going to score any goals.”

And it’s beginning to pay off.

“Now we’re exposing our kids to more grade-level work […] This is really promising to me, and I’m really proud of my staff.”