Jefferson City Public Schools made its long-term goal at the beginning of the school year to have all of its students reading at or above grade level, and Superintendent Larry Linthacum reported some progress at the most recent Board of Education meeting.
Increasing the percentage of students reading at or above grade level is also one of the district's three short-term goals for improvement.
The district had a competition last fall to encourage teachers and students to put extra effort into improvement.
JCPS Chief of Learning Brian Shindorf said the competition rewarded the classrooms in each grade with the most improvement in the percent of students reading at or above their grade level.
The district uses an assessment tool called iReady to measure students' reading performance and track their progress over time. The district began to use iReady at the beginning of the 2016-17 school year, and iReady also measures and tracks students' academic performance in math.
Shindorf said iReady assesses where the district hopes students are by the end of the year. That means the August assessment shows how much progress and with how many students could be made by May. The first-semester competition ran through the January mid-year assessment.
Teachers who won the competition received a JCPS "Raise the Bar" T-shirt and a coupon to wear jeans at school for five days. Students in their classrooms received free food coupons donated by McDonald's.
"Today, we're not doing that as part of the evaluation," Shindorf said of being able to measure the performance of individual teachers' students. He said instead that principals were asked to start to collect data that way so they could better identify where to provide the most academic support.
He said such data could be used in teacher evaluations in the future, but added the district is hesitant to do that, given not all classrooms are equal from the start.
Some teachers have more special-education students or more students whose first language is not English, for example, he said. Some schools have more students who live with poverty, and students living with poverty tend to struggle with learning more.
The iReady data from the first semester made it possible to compare one school in the district to another to determine which buildings had the most improvement in each grade between August and January in the percentage of students reading at or above their grade level:
Kindergarten: Cedar Hill Elementary School, 62 percent increase
First grade: Lawson Elementary School, 35 percent increase
Second grade: Cedar Hill, 31 percent increase
Third grade: West Elementary School, 31 percent increase
Fourth grade: Thorpe Gordon Elementary School, 21 percent increase
Fifth grade: Belair Elementary School, 21 percent increase.
Shindorf said the sixth through ninth grades competed against each other as grades instead of by building, and the combined eighth-grade class from Lewis and Clark Middle School and Thomas Jefferson Middle School won with an 8 percent increase.
Linthacum said TJMS had shown the most improvement for the sixth and eighth grades, and Lewis and Clark for seventh grade.
Shindorf added although an 8 percent increase for the eighth grade "is not a significant increase from August to January, eighth grades from both schools had 47 percent of students on or above grade level in January."
As previous data sets have shown, elementary school students have demonstrated they can show more improvement over the course of the year than middle school students.
"I think there's probably lots of things we can hypothesize," Shindorf said of why the gains in middle-schoolers' performance tends to flatten out. He said the structure of middle school being less personal - changing classes throughout the day as opposed to being with one teacher all day - and the age of students at that level could be factors.
There will be another competition this semester, and it will incorporate the percentage of students meeting their growth targets in addition to the percentage of students who show the most improvement.
Shindorf said growth targets are goals automatically set by iReady for each student the program assesses - for some students, it's closer to their grade level, and for others it's beyond it.
Linthacum shared which schools in the first semester this school year met their growth targets:
Kindergarten: Cedar Hill
First grade: North Elementary School
Second grade: Cedar Hill and Belair
Third grade: Belair
Fourth grade: Thorpe Gordon and East Elementary School
Fifth grade: Belair
Sixth and seventh grade: Lewis and Clark
Eighth grade: Thomas Jefferson
"I feel we're headed in the right direction," Linthacum said of the district's progress toward its reading performance goal.
The district will have an attendance contest for Jefferson City High School/Nichols Career Center and Jefferson City Academic Center based on improvement in the second semester of this year compared to last.