Are Students Learning…Quickly Enough?

Attention Florida Clients: We’ve made an important change to Growth Indicator #2 (formerly known as SMART Goal #2)!

For years now, we have displayed the percentage of students “scoring level 1 or 2 who are projected to earn learning gains” at the top of all teacher-facing visuals. It has been a useful proxy for monitoring the lowest-performing quartile, an important component of school grades in Florida.

However, now that our School Grades Projections folder includes a school-level, grade-level, and student-level accounting of learning gains projections for the lowest quartile, we realized we could use Growth Indicator #2 in a different way—to help teachers see what percentage of students in a classroom and grade level, regardless of ability level (or whether they “count” for school grades), are learning quickly enough.

So often, we see a pattern of students at higher achievement levels losing significant ground relative to their peers (as shown in the chart below), indicating they may not be receiving instruction aimed at the full depth of the grade-level standards. Our belief is this is an unintended consequence of systemic focus on the bottom quartile and “bubble kids.” The irony, of course, is that higher performing students who lose ground for multiple years in a row will no longer be high performing.

This shift in language intentionally begs the question, “What is enough?” Also—“How is learning quickly enough different from Growth Indicator #1 (to learn a year’s material in a year’s time)?”

K12 Lift has chosen to define the criteria for learning quickly enough as follows:

Students having a prior year (or baseline in the case of KG or retained students) achievement level of 1, 2, or 3 must increase their percentile ranking enough to move into the next achievement tier or level (e.g., low-1 to mid-1, high-1 to low-2, 3 to 4). Doing so will require they learn more than a year’s material in a year’s time (as shown in the conference form below).
Students having a prior year (or baseline in the case of KG or retained students) achievement level of 4 or 5 must maintain or increase their percentile ranking (i.e., meet Growth Indicator #1) AND maintain or increase their achievement level. In other words, they cannot lose ground relative to state peers.

We hope this change in language for Growth Indicator #2 will encourage more conversation and collaboration among educators around what it will take to ensure all students are given equitable opportunities to learn.