Foxborough Public Schools Are Committed to Making Continuous Improvements

Students in the Foxborough school system are consistently improving academically.

Dr. Amy Berdos, assistant superintendent of schools, presented the Foxborough School Committee with the results of the committee’s three-year Baseline and Benchmark Report. Overall, the students improved 94.6 percent over the report’s baseline assessment in various categories.

“The days of using once-a-year assessments are long gone,” said Berdos during the Nov. 7 school committee meeting. “If you want to make continuous improvements on a regular basis, you need make sure you analyze more than once source of data, such as MCAS.”

Three years ago Foxborough educators enacted the new guide for the entire school system, which would allow educators to identify strengths and weaknesses of the schools’ curriculum and instructional programs while instruction was still on-going.

The three-year rolling average analyzes where students are academically while instruction is still on-going, enabling educators to “beef up” subjects that students are performing poorly in at the moment. A report is given mid-year, as well as an annual year-end summary of achievement.

The 13 areas where students fell just shy of the benchmark goal include high school attendance; MCAS English Language Arts grade 5, those scoring in advanced or proficient; MCAS mathematics grade 6, those scoring in advanced or proficient; MCAS science, technology and engineering grade 5, those scoring in advanced or proficient; scholastic reading inventory grade 5, those scoring in advanced or proficient; MCAS English Language Arts grade 4, those scoring in advanced or proficient; MCAS math grade 4, those scoring in advanced or proficient; developmental reading inventory grades 3 and 4; writing assessment grades 2 through 4; and kindergarten letter/sound identification.

Educators used data from 2006-2008 to create the baseline and benchmark for MCAS improvements. However, only 2008-2009 data was available for much of the baseline figures used in setting attainable benchmarks for kindergarten through fourth-grade, which explains why the benchmark wasn’t reached, said Debra Spinelli, schools superintendent. For that baseline, educators used the Galileo assessment.

“If that were a three-year rolling average in the baseline column, we’d know that our benchmark is more reliable,” Spinelli said. “We really don’t know if that’s how students perform. It’s not statistically reliable.”

The process of evolving the schools’ curriculum to better serve the students includes not only the teachers and administrators, but also literacy specialists, and curriculum directors, Berdos said.

In order for teachers and administrators to better understand the data collected, Bedros said it was important for there to be a collaborative inquiry among all involved so that “we’re all speaking the same language.

“Those questions that come up allow us to see and dig even deeper,” she said, “so that by the time we start looking at it, (the problem) already has multiple perspectives. And what we may have thought was the root cause, may not be it at all.”

Grade 10 scored “off the charts” in the report, scoring well above the benchmark set in every category, which included the amount of students taking advanced placement exams, MCAS scores, SAT scores, continuing education and those students earning honors.

Despite the three-year benchmark data where only 2008-2009 data was used in the baseline, Dianne Casilli, Title I Director of K-8 English Language Arts and Social Studies, said that changes to the curriculum to improve students’ performance were still underway.

“Writing is an area of review for us,” she said. “We know that students need more help developing solid paragraph and to build better sentences.”