By John Lee jclee@thepampanews.com Twitter: @jcl1987
All campuses ‘met standard’ for the first time in three years, the second time in six years.
Pampa Independent School District recently received some good news concerning the District’s accountability standards. All of the District’s seven campuses received a “met standard” with the State’s accountability system. “The accountability system is set up with many different criteria and is a very complex system,” Pampa ISD Superintendent Tanya Larkin said. “Basically they set up four areas to look at schools to determine whether or not they met a state standard for being unacceptable or meeting the standard.” The criteria are broken down into four indexes: student performance, student progress, closing gaps, and college and career readiness. The student performance is simply how many tests are passed. The student progress is how many students made an annual year’s growth, regardless of pass or fail. “Oftentimes that’s really a more telling indicator, ”Larkin said. “Even if a student hasn’t passed yet, that growth needs to be there. ”The third indicator, closing gaps, is if the school is closing the gaps between the highest performing areas and the lowest-performing areas. It’s about making sure you don’t have large gaps in the under-represented student groups. The final category, college, and career readiness, at the high school level, is set up by different criteria such as dual-credit or advanced placement courses, scoring advanced on end-of-course exams, or taking a coherent amount of courses in career technical education. “At the junior high and elementary schools, there aren’t very many indicators other than looking at the advanced scoring on your STAAR tests,” Larkin said. Historically, Pampa has overcome many obstacles in meeting state standards; including the shift from TAKS to STAAR/EOC, leadership changes at all campuses, high teacher turnover, and the ever-changing landscape of the TEKS(Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills).“We had a lot of turnover at our high leadership positions with new principals,” Larkin said. “So when you look at that, there’s been a lot of change not just at the schools but in the system. So it’s taken us just a little bit of time to get it all together.”
On top of the changing system, the standards on the test keep going up and Larkin described it as trying to hit a moving target. “They’re still changing TEKS, they’re still changing materials and they’re still changing the whole accountability system,” Larkin said. One of the ways PISD is working to retain more teachers is by providing a solid mentoring program and first-year teacher academy. We actually had fewer new hires here than we had in a long time, and we hired fewer first-year teachers, ”Larkin said. Last January, Pampa ISD also implemented a continuous improvement system where the District took a hard look at what may have been the cause of some areas not meeting standards.
Published on 09/01/2016
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