The School Accountability Report is issued by the State of Colorado for all public schools. It contains information about teachers, student teacher ratio and how the district spends tax payer monies. It also contains information about how students performed on the CSAP, which are standardized tests given in 3-8^th grade in reading, writing, math, and science. Schools are given ratings for overall academic performance and academic growth of students.

 

Very well and incredibly well. The state lumps our students into two groups, the 1-5^th grade and the 6-8^th grade. I am unsure why the 1-2 is included since they do not take the CSAP. The state seems to slice the grades this way because our number of students is so small.

 

Grades 1-5                   Average                                               Significant Improvement

Grades 6-8                   Excellent                                               Significant Improvement

 

It’s great, and not surprising, news! For the past six years ACS has consistently scored well on the CSAPs. The fact that all grades showed significant improvement is excellent. The fact that the 6-8 has one of the highest ratings of any group of students in the state is a tribute to hard working kids and excellent instruction. The State of Colorado recognizes this by awarding the ACS 6-8^th grade the John C, Irwin School of Excellence Award. This designation only goes to the schools in the top 8% statewide. We have earned this honor twice in the last three years. However, it’s important to keep all this good news in perspective. Because of our small size our “ratings” have bounced around a bit. This happens because in a small school each student’s score can have a rather large effect on the overall school score. State issued ratings can be notoriously deceptive. For example, ACS frequently has entire classes that are 100% proficient or advanced. While this is great news, we still evaluate individual student scores and look for ways to support growth and improvement. It’s important to recognize that statistically it doesn’t make sense to compare our 7-8 grade class of 23 students who were 100% proficient or advanced to the Aspen Middle School 7-8 grade class of 200 students (who achieved a combined score of only 80% proficient or advanced). This type of comparison is fraught with pitfalls and serves only to distract us from our goal, which is student learning.   We have learned to be less concerned with our “rating” and more concerned with each individual student and what we can learn as a school from the results.

 

This report is great news and we should remember that the focus needs to stay on improving student learning.