Caverna Awaits Audit Results

“This whole process is being done

in the dark of the night

and changes from one minute to the next ...

If I don’t have a lot of trust,

you probably know why."

--Caverna Superintendent Sam Dick

This from the Glasgow Daily Times, photo at WKU:

Caverna School District officials say they have yet to learn the results of the academic audit Caverna High School recently had and the district’s superintendent is becoming irritated and distrustful toward the process.

CHS was recently identified as a persistently low achieving school, along with nine other schools, by the Kentucky Department of Education in the state’s Race to the Top federal grant application.“They have not let us know anything as to what the results are. They said it can take up to 30 days,” said Sam Dick, superintendent, who addressed the Caverna Board of Education Thursday night.

The audit was conducted in March and Dick said the team that did the audit was very “congenial, helpful and very thorough.”

Since the audit was conducted, state education officials have learned Kentucky did not receive any Race to the Top funding in the first round.

The 10 schools that did appear on the list, however, still qualify for school improvement grants.

Caverna is set to receive $500,000 over three years in school improvement grant funding.Dick visited Frankfort last week and met with state education commissioner Terry Holliday, state senators and state representatives to make sure “this process is done in a way that we get what’s coming to us — just to ensure that we are still on the radar.”

“I received an e-mail last night from a team at KDE, which wants to come down and meet with us. They gave me four or five dates. I was kind of upset about that today,” Dick said, adding the district now has to complete an application. “They are going to offer technical assistance [to complete the application] in the form of a two-hour meeting.”

Some of the information that would be included in the application is how the school district plans to assess CHS, what intervention model was to be used at the school and a three-year budget on how the district is going to spend the $500,000.

Dick responded to the KDE team informing them the district has not learned the outcome of the academic audit and cannot answer the additional questions.

Dick said he was told that when the second team wants to meet with district officials, they anticipate having the results of the academic audit.“This whole process is being done in the dark of the night and changes from one minute to the next,” he said.

One of the questions Dick had for the academic team was who chooses the intervention model.

“The team, when it was here, said it did. The commissioner, when I talked to him, said he did. The legislators, when I talked to them, said the statute said I did and somebody else said it was the site-based council,” Dick said. “So we really don’t know who gets to pick the intervention model.”

He continued that in speaking to state legislators there were some things that have transpired that were not in the Race to the Top legislation.

“For example, the concept of removing the school principal, which is in every one of the models. When I brought it up to [state representative] Johnny Bell, he said, ‘That wasn’t our intent. Our intent was to do the audit, find out where you were wrong and give you a year or two to get it straightened back up,’” Dick said, adding he told Bell that was not what Caverna officials have been told...

School officials discuss concordance tables

This from the Glasgow Daily Times:

All understand them, but some do not like results from their use

By GINA KINSLOW
Glasgow Daily Times

GLASGOW — The Kentucky Board of Education has decided to continue using a concordance table for 2008 CATS results and to apply it to accountability index scores for 2007 and 2008.

A concordance table, which put the CATS scores in a bell curve, was used to determine the scores that were released by the state last week. Because a concordance table was used, many district scores, as well as scores for individual schools, dropped after they were adjusted, putting them further away from reaching their goals.

That is what happened with Caverna Middle School. The school had an overall academic index of 70.2, which means the school would have been considered progressing. After the school’s score was adjusted, it fell to 66.7, which is below the assistance line.

Dr. Sam Dick, superintendent of Caverna Independent Schools, was happy to hear the state school board’s decision.

“I’m glad that the department (Kentucky Department of Education) is clarifying some issues concerning the concordance,” he said. “I am still interested in seeing how this is going to affect our accountability levels, since the goal and assistance level was not put up against a concordance table.”

Concordance tables were used to determine the 2007 CATS scores because of changes in core content and the Kentucky Core Content exam, plus a legislative requirement that the state’s public school students participate in the ACT and its companions PLAN and EXPLORE exams.

This spring all high school students statewide will be required to take the ACT. The test will count 5 percent of districts’ and schools’ accountability.

This year was not the first time changes have been made in regards to the state’s accountability system.

In 1999, Kentucky switched from the KIRIS (Kentucky Instructional Results Information Systems) to the CATS. When those changes occurred, the state used a regression table rather than a concordance table and established new baseline scores.

Dick doesn’t understand why the state didn’t use regression tables this time instead of the concordance tables.

“There were probably, in my opinion, as many changes, if not more, to the tests when we switched from KIRIS to CATS,” he said.

Benny Lile, director of instruction for the Barren County School System, said the regression table had its “shortcomings” too.

“The regression model was how you compared to everyone else,” he said. “So, I think that probably what the department did was use a little bit cleaner model, a model that had a little bit more of direct statistical link back to the system. I think this one was a little bit smoother even with all the confusion and comments thrown in and around it.”

Sharon Reeves, instructional supervisor for the Glasgow Independent School System, said she can understand why the state school board decided to use concordance tables next year.

She also said she can understand why some district administrators are upset about the use of the tables, especially when their districts and/or schools’ scores dropped so low that they fell into assistance levels.

Glasgow, however, did not experience that problem even though most of the districts’ scores dropped after being adjusted.

“I’m frustrated about it, too, even though our district is not having to deal with that particular problem,” she said.