Students Regents Performance Breakdown Term-to-Term
Students Regents Performance Breakdown January-to-January
The depth of analysis is hindered somewhat by my status as a software Luddite. Back in 2006, the year I became a public school teacher, I took a class at Brooklyn College that finally forced me to learn how to use Microsoft Excel. Since then, I've gotten a little better at not just presenting data but in thinking about data in a way that makes it easier to analyze. A half-decade later, I find myself at the point where I should be moving up to bigger and better tools. Alas, the same hesitation that kept me from opening my first spreadsheet file now keeps me from taking off the training wheels.
Fortunately, there's Google which, if you haven't been keeping up with current events, has been ramping up its data visualization apps via Google Docs. It's still a little clunky compared to Excel, but it works if you're patient. Besides, they've got the "cloud" on their side. Having navigated my way through more than a few Excel crashes, I've learned to prize that Google Docs autosave feature.
Anyway, enough advertising. Inspired by a recent Slate article on data visualization and in a post-Madison spirit of teacher transparency, I decided to post some recent creations. The above is a "stacked" column presentation of my students' term-to-term Regent performance.
ANALYSIS:
The above two charts differentiats students who passed the Regents with a 65 score or better (green layer) from students who failed the Regents (yellow and red layers) and, finally, students who failed to show up to take the Regents (black layer). The top chart tracks results term-to-term. The bottom chart, meanwhile, tracks only those students taking the January Regents exam, an off-track test generally reserved for students who failed or failed to take the exam when it was regularly administered at the end of the school year.
Differentiation between students who came within 10 points of passing (yellow layer) and students who fell below the 55 level (red layer) is based on two concerns: First, the state uses the 55 score as a graduation threshold for certain (read: special ed) students. Secondly, as a teacher who works primarily with remedial students, I generally find that a term's worth of algebra review adds, on average, 5 to 10 points to a student's Regent score. In other words, rather than seeing a kid who moves from 45 to 55 as a failure, I'm trying to view it as a success.
Including the absent students in this analysis is based on the rationale that each student who ducks the test is a vote of no-confidence in either the teacher, the school or the method of in-class instruction. Granted, a lot of these no-shows are no-shows in the classroom, long term absences the school has been forced to keep on the books whilst various city departments (education, corrections, social services) come to a basic agreement on where the student truly belongs. In such cases it's pretty hard for even the best teacher to have an improving impact.
Of more concern, however, are the kids who will sit through 18 or 36 weeks of a class and yet, on the day of the test, decide to stay at home. As the chart shows, I've been largely successful in reducing test-day absence cases -- until this year at least. Alas, a blizzard on the morning of this years January Algebra Regents compelled at least a dozen of my regularly attending students to stay at home. For next go-around, I have only Freshman classes, with a day-to-day attendance rate in 90% range. Barring a freak June snowstorm, I expect the black no show column to continue its downward drift.
SO WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH JANUARY, 2010?
Good question. Here's what happened: During the fall term of 2008-2009, my second year as a high school teacher, we offered ME33, a Regents Review courses for students who'd failed the previous June Regents exam. Because students had already gone through a year (at least) of the Freshman algebra curriculum, the teachers who taught this class were free to choose their own textbook and set their own pacing calendar. My assistant principal gave me 4 of those classes with a test-day roster of 123 students. Of those 123 students, only 34 passed scored a 64 or better. Tossing out the 28 no shows, that still only gave me a 35 percent passage rate. Pretty weak. Especially when you compare it to the roughly 50 percent passage rate the two other teachers handling the other six ME33 courses posted that same term year.
Long story short, the reason the January, 2010 totals dip so precipitously is that my supervisor, remembering that 36% passage rate, shifted me to the back of the line up, reducing my total number of ME33 courses to two instead of four. I can't fault him for this decision in retrospect as I was able to use the opportunity to focus on raising both my Regents day attendance rate (83% from 77%) and my attending cohort passage rate (51% from 36%).
Anyway, in reward for that performance, I was given a third class and a bigger average class size (34 students per) in this year's ME33 go-around. Though I let things slip a bit on test-day attendance (back down to 70% with partial blame going to Mother Nature), I was able to keep the passage rate moving upward (58%). What's more, I was able to grow the share of "on deck" students (31% from 20% in 2010), making things that much easier for the next review class teacher.
Which leads to a final point of analysis: When the next math teacher is you, it helps to differentiate the instructional strategy in a way that the student who didn't reach the 65 passage threshold comes into your next class feeling like a success as opposed to a failure. While the January 2011 results shows the usual downward dip that occurs during the algebra off-season, I'm pleased to note the even faster decline in "red state" students, i.e. students unlikely to pass the Regents exam on the next go around and thus very likely to be sitting in (or cutting) the exact same ME33 class next fall.
LESSONS LEARNED?
Lesson 1: It helps to look at data. Back in 2007, a year after moving up from the middle school ranks, I thought teaching math in high school was a snap. After all, 60 percent of the kids I had who sat for the first Integrated Algebra Regents exam wound up passing the exam -- compared with a schoolwide passage rate in the 40-45 percent range. Six months later, however, the tables turned. Suddenly I was the department goat. In an effort to bring my numbers back in line, I've been forced to watch other teachers in action and admit that I'm not the smartest guy in the room. The process has been humbling but also illuminating. One thing I noticed is that the teachers who were beating were dealing with the same classroom issues (spotty attendance, mouthy students, cellphones, iPods, etc.). The only real difference between them and me was the level of overall consistency and patience those teachers demonstrated when it came to navigating the 18 week curriculum. Hence my growing mania for classroom routine.
Lesson 2: Experience helps. While I don't have the same data for other teachers' classes, the limited amount of analysis I've done on the department-wide stats shows an interesting trend: Where I am right now, statistically, tends to be where the leading teacher in the department was two years ago. How many additional years of teaching experience does that teacher have on me? Two years. Exactly. While our stats drew pretty much even over the last term, I still have to give her the edge as she had one more class (30+ students) and a much more sizable IEP cohort (40+ students, vs. 15 on my part). True, she had a co-teacher with a special-ed license in the room, but I'm not in a rush to trade places with her.
Anyway, I bring this lesson up only because it coincides with the ongoing debate about seniority privilege, especially when it comes to hiring and firing. As much as I want to paint myself as exactly the kind of "young" and "energetic" teacher reform advocates like Mayor Michael Bloomberg have been championing in recent years, the numbers so far appear to be making a pitch for "experience" and "consistency," especially when it comes to lower performing students, of which we have an abundance here in New York City.
Lesson 3: Test lightly. One thing I found out pretty quickly way back in 2008-2009 is that students with a history of failure on the Regents tend to view the test as an un-motivating exercise. Sure, they'll take each test seriously but the moment that first negative test score comes back, you've pretty much lost that student for the rest of the term. As a result, a lot of my instruction has focused on delaying that first negative test score as long as possible. This last term, I went even farther, borrowing another teacher's system of giving weekly quizzes and giving those quizzes equal cumulative weight to the 5 tests offered during the same term. What's more, I made sure to score each quiz in a way that set a 40 percent "floor" for students who missed every question and that rewarded effort (backing up a multiple choice answer with sideline work, say) over mere knowledge retention.
Granted, there is a sizable faction within my school's math department that views this type of an assessment strategy as yet another sign of the educational apocalypse. Still, the resulting data shows a significant uptick in off-term Regents performance.
Lesson 4: We're making progress but it's slow progress. A 42 percent failure rate is nothing to crow about,I know, but it sure as heck beats the 65 percent failure rate I was staring down two Januaries ago. Reducing that failure rate to something a little more tolerable, 33 percent say, will require an equal, if not greater multi-year effort, I think. For one thing, there's only so much training you can give a student in 18 weeks. For another, there's only so much education you can truly impart in a culture where most students a) blow off homework, b) miss an average of 4 school days per month and c) don't exactly have the home support structure compelling them to aim higher in education or life. Simply put, there are many phases in this conflict. The classroom is just one theater. A key theater, no doubt, but theater nonetheless. Until the other theaters show change, I expect to see a few more ups and downs in each chart.
