School Board Meeting July 25th at 6:30 PM

Click on the post to view the agenda for Monday's ECSD Board Meeting. The Board and Administrators have interviewed for the business manager position and will present the preferred candidate for board approval.

Additional topics include review of the updated budget projection and several board development topics. I will be able to attend this meeting and the August regular meeting as well. Apparently the regularly scheduled August 8th meeting will be changed to August 15, after I come back from the cabin. This is a good thing, since the budget is still in some nebulous limbo of undefined proportions and I'd like to see what is proposed.

It's not going to be a good year for school budgets and some harsh choices will have to be made. Board membership is particularly difficult wherever one lives these days. Somehow the powers that be have successfully demonized the public schools while painting other areas of the economic sector in an unrealistically glowing light. If any of these so-called politicians would attend any one year's worth of ECSD school board meetings to see what kind of catch-22 choices have to be made at every meeting, month after month, maybe they would have the knowledge of what the hell it is they are doing to education. Meanwhile, they support expanding school choice, the institutions of which have never before last fall been required to adhere to the NCLB achievement stipulations. REALLY? You DON'T know how they are performing as compared to the evil public sector, but your recommend expanding the multimillion dollar program? You guys are ignorant. And that's the nice way to put it.

In other news, there is a new principal at TRIS. I hope to have an article about her in the next few weeks under my Evansville Review byline. Maybe at the same time as I report on the new business manager next week. Stay tuned to the same byline for breaking news on the budget and any plans for cuts to the 11-12 budget.

Agenda for Board Meeting 7-14-11

Click on the post to see the agenda for tomorrow night's board meeting. They will interview a candidate for TRIS principal and discuss approval in closed session followed by discussion of the criteria for business manager. I have a swim meet to attend and won't be there for this meeting.

No Board Meeting on Monday July 11, Special Meetings Scheduled, Agendas to Follow.

Please note that the regular business board meeting will not be held this Monday. The standing dates are the second and fourth Mondays of the month. Instead, there will be a special meeting on Thursday the 14th, the agenda of which is not yet available. I believe they will be finalizing the job description for the District Business Manager and perhaps interviewing a candidate. Stay tuned for the posted agenda here. There is another meeting on July 18th regarding strategic planning and perhaps another interview. The regular meetings of the whole will be on July 25 at 6:30 PM, normal schedule.

School District gets new website!

Click on the link to see the new ECSD website! It's going to take some getting used to, but should be easier to maintain, according to the district.

July School Board Meetings to be At different Times!

Just a heads up on July School Board Meetings. Things will be different than usual, as they often are in the summer. I was always surprised at how much work gets done in the summer at a public school. Anyway, they have to hire three administrators this summer: District Business Manager (first priority), Student Services director and a Principal at TRIS. Things were flying fast and furious at the end of the last meeting, but here's the gist of what I heard. July 11 Business Meeting agenda deferred to August 8 at 6:30 PM. There will be a meeting July 14 at 6:30 PM to discuss qualifications necessary for the Business Manager position and interview a candidate. Monday July 18th at 6:30 there will be a strategic planning meeting, Monday July 25 at 6:30 is the committee meetings of the whole with time set aside for interviewing another candidate for the Business Manager. The meeting minutes will be approved at one of these on a consent agenda since by law they must be done at the next meeting.

Finally, if you're really trying to fill in your "school board" calendar for the year, note that the Annual Meeting date has been changed from September 26th to October 24th at 7pm. This is the meeting I pester and cajole all of you residents of the Evansville Community School District to attend and let your voices be heard. Don't like the fact that the school raised taxes last year by 8%? Did you go and complain? I was at that meeting. I think not. Every district resident has a vote at the Annual Meeting, specifically when setting the levy. I will acknowledge that it is a non-binding vote (the board usually considers it an advisement). The final vote to set the levy only includes the board and must take place before October 29 or something like that. Consider yourselves adequately notified that this meeting is on the radar. I will attempt to keep current with the budget, but expect some glitches as a new person is trained in.

I Lied: I Really DO Care

After reading a Wisconsin State Journal article the first week of June regarding which schools failed to achieve Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), I posted here that I was pretty surprised to see that JC McKenna wasn't on the list. Readers may remember that achieving AYP is required to meet the federal No Child Left Behind law (NCLB). I ranted about liars and statistics and concluded that by 2014 we'll all still be just as stupid as we were in 2001 before the act was implemented. I still believe that but qualify that with a statement that there is plenty of documentation now to tell us the magnitude to which we are ignorant. Unfortunately, that only applies if one believes that the WSAS, an assessment system comprised of the WKCE and the Wisconsin Alternate Assessment for Students with disabilities, accurately measures achievement. I don't have any confidence in the assessment, so my qualification is moot.

If any of you follow my byline in the Review, you will have seen my article regarding Superintendent Carvin's happy announcement on June 13th that all buildings in the district achieved AYP. There was no mention in her announcement that JC McKenna achieved it only through the Confidence Interval qualification. When I wrote my first post on June 8, I was well aware of the statistical qualification of Confidence Intervals (CI). What I wasn't aware of was what level of CI is imposed on the data nor was I privy to the data set on which the CI was calculated. In fact, the DPI seems to be the only ones who have this data set, likely due to concerns about the general population misusing the data.

CI calculations are derived on a basis of the standard deviation (sigma) of a data set, assigning the 75th percent confidence level at +/- one sigma, 95% at +/- two sigma and 99% at +/- three sigma. Use of CI assumes data is normally distributed in a bell curve. Typical experimental evaluations are considered robust at the 95th percent confidence level. The lack of access to the data set used makes it impossible for me to assess the statistical treatment of this data. I am very skeptical that these data are normally distributed, however. Also suspect, in my opinion, is the use of the 99th percent confidence level, which results in a confidence interval through which one could drive a very large truck.

Since I did all of the calculations back in April to determine if any Evansville schools were in danger of failing to meet AYP, I knew JC McKenna missed the 2010-11 reading goal for students with disabilities by more than ten percent. What I didn't expect was Confidence Intervals that exceeded ten percent, but there it was. The online reports issued by the DPI do not have qualifiers on the data. I emailed the DPI to ask what the heck was going on with reports that did not have any qualifiers on them. I was told that the upper limit on the confidence interval around this data statistically predicted that JC McKenna's 70.33% reading proficiency index for students with disabilities has an upper limit of 82.9%, well over the 80.5% required target. Furthermore, the online reports "are space limited" and don't include qualifiers. That is so bogus. The report to school say Yes-CI. Are you telling me that the online reports don't have space for three more characters? They just don't want to field questions from people who have enough brains to figure out what the heck they are doing. Talk about baffling them all with bull%^&.

I am the first person to acknowledge that small populations and wide distributions of ability levels naturally lead to large variability in data. This knowledge is accompanied by the added awareness that these statistical techniques may very well be misused. Lack of access to the raw data from which the calculations are derived makes it impossible to really know. I'm sure that's exactly how the DPI wants it to be.

If the standard 95th percent confidence level had been assigned to the go/no go decision, JC McKenna would have failed to meet AYP. Furthermore, and of greater concern, is that JC McKenna data indicated a significant increase in the number of students in the same subgroup performing at basic and minimum in reading, a step backwards and an indicator of trouble brewing. Combine this with the 10.5% increase in math goal and 6.5% increase in reading goal next year and Evansville will likely see our own school included on the "failed to meet AYP" list for 2011-12. I know you're sick of hearing me predict doom and gloom and then being wrong. If this years trends are repeated next year, and NCLB is not modified, that will be the result.

They will be in a lot of good company to be sure. If next year's increase in goals causes the nearly 100% increase in the number of schools failing AYP that was seen this year, over 400 schools will fail to meet AYP. That rate is nearly one for every district in Wisconsin. I'm not trying to pick on Evansville in general or JC McKenna in particular. School districts are not a fault for the data assessment, but must be wary of accepting the blanket statements from the data manipulators. However, it is not my observation that there is sufficient skepticism on the part of the district administration to aggressively pursue solutions proactively before sanctions are implemented.

The dolts in the federal government need to see that what they have in NCLB is more unfunded mandates that schools simply can't afford to maintain anymore. For the pittance in aid received by our district for this program and others for that matter, it seems time to reevaluate participation in such mandates.

School Board Meetings of the Whole Monday June 27 at 6:30 pm

Click on the post to see the agenda for Monday night's School Board Meeting. Please note that the first item on the agenda is an Executive session. If you're a little late, you won't miss anything except the board excusing itself to discuss some personnel issue, as prescribed by law.

However, once underway, this meeting promises to provide a lot of information to those interested in student achievement, projected budget, costs of co-curricular programming, projected enrollment and much much more. Stay tuned here or my byline in the Review for pertinent updates.