The Weaver Steering Committee achieved its first goal – developing 30 plus recommendations for the new Weaver High School.

It’s been a little over a year since a community driven partnership with the Hartford Public Schools to design the new Weaver High School began.  The co-led design process marshalled the collective talents of some sixty or so community leaders, nonprofit partners, parents, teachers, students, concerned residents and HPS staff to design a high school never before realized in Hartford.  From the beginning, the dream has been to make manifest a school that would simultaneously address all of the challenges faced by North Hartford students entering high school severely underprepared while unlocking all of the potential these students have to win in life and in our local economy.  And in that school, students’ robust and rigorous learning experience is to be informed by the many community partners taking part in the process.

The significance of this project was not lost on us or any stakeholder involved,  as we already made note of here, here and here. Our desire has always been for Hartford to provide more high-quality educational opportunities for kids, and our belief has always been that the school district cannot do this alone.  Through this process, it has been our hope to demonstrate exactly what a diverse team of community leaders can do on behalf of its children, its future college freshman, and its future employees.

Over the past year, workgroup members have put in long hours debating and discussing their biggest ideas, many informed by community forums, research, and the presentation of best practices in urban education here locally and from across the country.  The result? So far, 30+ foundational recommendations to guide the design and execution of the new Weaver High. The combined recommendations form the basis of a plan that will shape how the new Weaver High School delivers academic learning experiences, engages with families and the community, and creates industry partnerships.

As a backbone support to the steering committee and each of the workgroups, we believe the recommendations are the best chance to deliver on the promise of giving each Weaver High student what they need to succeed.

Much work remains to be done within a short time frame. The plan must make its way through a vetting process with the Superintendent and HPS leadership, but then immediately after that we can start the formation of implementation teams that can work cross sector to make each recommendation a reality.

We’ll have more to share with you over the summer as the initial planning process wraps up. In the meantime, check out www.weaver2019.com for more information and stay tuned for ways you can get involved. Remember, Hartford can be and will be the first city in our state to produce high school graduates truly ready for college and career.

Visit www.allinhartford.org to learn more

Connecticut Next Generation Accountability System

Background

Per the Connecticut State Department of Education (CSDE)¹: “Connecticut’s Next Generation Accountability System is a broad set of 12 indicators that help tell the story of how well a school is preparing its students for success in college, careers and life. The system moves beyond test scores and graduation rates and instead provides a more holistic, multifactor perspective of district and school performance and incorporates student growth over time. It was developed through extensive consultation with district and school leaders, Connecticut educators, state and national experts, CSDE staff, and many others. The system was conceived and developed under ESEA Flexibility and approved by the U.S. Department of Education (USED) on August 6, 2015. It was later included as part of Connecticut’s state plan under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).”

The “Performance Index” scores are whole numbers for some indicators, and percentages for others. For the sake of consistency, we instead use the “percentage of points earned” for each indicator. This is also how the state determines the final overall index score.

Analysis

The table below contains the last three years of results for Hartford under the Next Generation Accountability System, and those results are mixed.

First, SBAC test scores are going down. Despite an upward bump in 2015-16, Hartford is earning similar or fewer points under this model for each of these measures (Indicators 1a-1f) as compared to 2014-15. The situation is even worse when considering the state’s SBAC Growth Model (Indicators 2a-2d), a measure of student improvement year-over-year; the losses on these indicators are responsible for the largest drops in percentage of points earned for Hartford Public Schools. That said, the Growth Model was not in place in 2014-15, so those indicators are blank for the first year in the table below. We therefore recommend a corresponding level of caution in interpreting the trends (or lack thereof) for those indicators.

On the other hand, the percentage of points earned by the Hartford Public Schools has increased (or stayed level) since 2014-15 on all of the other measures (Indicators 4a-12). For most of those measures, that means the rates have gone up, but note that in the case of Indicators 4a-4b, this means the rate of chronic absenteeism has gone down.

Overall, we see a downward trend in Hartford’s final Accountability Index score. Provisionally, one might conclude that Hartford appears to be making inroads on the indicators which apply to Grades 9-12, while falling behind on those which apply to Grades 3-8. If this is the case, any short-term progress being made at the high schools will be outweighed in the long run as those younger cohorts make their way through the system.

1 http://edsight.ct.gov/SASPortal/main.do