Reply to Petition to Change Sela Leadership

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Reply to "Petition to Change Sela Leadership"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I will say - as someone who has a kid at Sela and thinks it's overall a pretty solid school - the "growth" metric...to an extent which I hadn't fully grasped beforehand....has actually emerged as a key headache (I say this with the caveat that from what I understand, this issue would be the same at just about any DC public or charter school):
My kid is both one of the oldest in the class and a pretty motivated learner, and I knew from the DCPS list of academic goals for their grade that they weren't going to actually "learn" anything new all year. Fair enough! Yet it was a bit of a head scratcher when the first assessment sent home scored them as "achieving" far below where I knew they currently were, with a "goal" of reaching a level they had surpassed long ago. This isn't some subjective measure - to give one example of many: my kid could already count to 50 before they enrolled. The first assessment sheet that got sent home three months later said they were "M - Meet Expectations" because they were "able to count to 5" with a "goal" of learning to count to 20 in the next quarter. Uh...

I'm not sure what other takeaways a parent is supposed to have other than: first, that this class is being taught to the lowest common denominator and isn't equipped for students who are ready for greater challenges...and, with that reality in mind, the only way teachers are able to indicate any of that all-important "growth" for these students is by actively downplaying and under-assessing their actual abilities at the beginning of the year, so there is "growth" to show at the end of it - even if that final report doesn't represent one iota of actual learning, just a more accurate assessment, one that could have been issued on Day One.

Again: I don't think this is unique to Sela. [b]From what I can tell, this would be just as true, if not more so, at any DCPS or charter. But yeah...it's not ideal.[/b]
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I'm really puzzled by this statement. Lots of schools, DCPS and charter, have much higher growth stats than Sela does. [/quote]

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