Polk County has chosen — seemingly gratuitously — to punish its students for their performance on End of Year (EoY) and End of Course (EoC) tests. This punishment stands out among other districts that have chosen not to level this same level of punishment. It matters deeply for your child’s grade point average, which, in turn, matters deeply for graduation, college admission, and scholarships.
This is a complex thing to explain. I’ll try to do it clearly and briefly, while noting what I still don’t fully grasp.
Bright futures hopefuls take careful note
An EoC is a state-mandated final test for a subject, like, say, Algebra. Not all classes require a state EoC. An EoY test is a local-district-mandated test. I remain unclear as to whether a local district is required to give any EoY tests. They may all be voluntary. But I’m not sure. Still working on that.
The state requires that its EoCs account for 30 percent of a class grade. But, to my understanding, the state does not tell districts how to come up with the number that makes up the 30 percent. Wait, you might say, wouldn’t you just use the 93 A score you would get for getting 93 our of 100 questions right?
No, it seems you wouldn’t. Not in Florida. The tests are not graded like the final exams of yore. In the recent past, I am told Polk County used 1-4 system to indicate state EoC performance. Here’s the significance of that: if your student earned As in both semesters of a class — and received a B-level or 3-level grade on the EoC, that student would still get an A for the year.
I am told that has changed. I’m not sure when, precisely. And I don’t trust Heather Wright’s Polk District accountability department to be honest about anything. (More on that in a moment.) So I’m not going to bother asking. Someone can just correct me if they feel the need. The new system of EoC grading uses 95-85-75-etc scale for performance. If you’re like me, and you say, how the hell would that even work in relation to an actual EoC test grade?, I don’t have any answers for you. The practical effect is to make the B-level performance (the 85) suck your student’s A-level class grade down to a B overall. As I understand it, that is in effect now. Please correct me if this is wrong. Multiple people have told this to me.
That’s the core disadvantage the School District is choosing to impose on its students with EoCs as they compete with the students of other districts. But it gets worse with EoYs.
Again, I’m not sure if we are required to impose any EoYs at the district level. If we are not, I would urge us to trash them all.
However, there is definitely no requirement that we make a district-level EoY worth 30 percent of a student’s final grade. We, in Polk County, have chosen to do that. Please ask Heather Wright and Jacque Bowen why. Their email addresses are easy to get from the District’s website. By contrast, for instance, St Johns County, which is generally considered “the best” School District in the state makes its EoYs worth 10 percent for high school kids and 5 percent for middle schoolers. Take a look at this link for a glimpse of a high-performing district that gives a shit about its kids and the classroom experience.
Your kids are competing against those kids with artificially-generated Bs where they get As. Period.
To compound matters, Polk uses the same blinkered 95-85-75-system for EoYs. It appears to be impossible to score a 100 on an EoC or EoY test because the 95-85-75-etc. level system is percentile based — meaning it’s measured against other kids, not an objective standard for passing or failing.
I will admit that I’m not sure of that. It seems crazy that only a set number of kids can score the highest score on an EoC or EoY. Maybe I’ve misunderstood. I almost doubt that even Wright’s office would do something that nuts. But the School District’s web site is completely incomprehensible, so I can’t tell. It does seem as if, at some point, they “scaled” — otherwise known as “rigged” — the test to reflect the same distribution as actual grades achieved in class. But it’s a baffling thing to try to determine.
And with that in mind, it’s important to remember that teachers do not compile or administer these tests in any meaningful way. Rather, the person who conceives and administers these tests — at least the district-level EoYs — is Heather Wright.
The crown jewel of an educrat’s career
And I would now like to walk you through Wright’s personal and professional incentives. To say they do not align with your child’s well-being is to err on the side of subtlety. The EoY/EoC system being used in Polk County defines Heather Wright’s career and personal well-being.
When you understand that, as I now do, it becomes very easy to understand why Citizens for Better Educational Leadership (CBEL) received such a gooey and condescending response to our good faith effort to engage on testing issues.
As a wise person once wrote: “It’s very difficult to get a person to understand something if that person’s job depends on not understanding it.”
Heather Wright’s entire career and future depends on not doing anything CBEL or teachers or parents ask her to do. She and the entire accountability office are incompatible with the future we want for our county, to which she, of course has no tie, history, loyalty, or sentiment. Speaking only for myself, this kind of abstracted, self-dealing educratic garbage is the number one characteristic I want purged from the Polk School District.
We’re going to discuss this at our CBEL meeting Thursday night, but I think you can expect that until Wright is gone, CBEL will be in open conflict with school administration. I suspect we’ll make total rework of the accountability office our number 1 priority for School Board elections.
Heather Wright is the IBTP
Here are a few facts — and a few logical inferences — about the woman who leads our School District’s accountability office.
1. Heather Wright is defending her baby. And her baby matters much, much more to her than yours. Wright is by all appearances a — perhaps the — key statewide architect of something called the Item Bank and Test Platform (IBTP). It is a database/bank of 90,000 test questions. Their prime use seems to be for district-mandated End of Year tests (EoY). They may also be used for state mandated End of Course (EoC) tests. But I’m less clear about that. For now, check out this power point presentation she gave on May 28, 2014, which is slathered in the logo of the state Department of Education.
Here’s a link to the whole thing.
Wright even co-ordinated the collection of non-disclosure agreements for working with the database when she worked for Osceola County’s schools.
Somehow she got involved in the creation of this statewide database/test bank and made a name for herself in educrat circles. So this is not a case of a well-meaning accountability professional just trying to manage the state’s demands and tools, etc. It’s doubtful that any district will have an accountability leader more fundamentally in lockstep with every stupid thing the state does than Heather Wright. DoE has been her audience all along, wherever she worked. The actual local kids are just tools of her advancement.
We administered our mid-year progress monitoring test on the IBTP. We tested 2,000 to 4,000 students per grade level in all state tested courses and K-2 language arts. It went very smoothly, especially for being our first administration and of that scale. We have an older student information system, so at first we had some trouble with CET and rostering. We resolved it and students were able to test. For the Single Sign-on experience for students, it went well for the most part. Some elementary schools were not very excited about students creating their accounts, so teachers or administrators created accounts for them. It was a great enhancement to the system for teachers to be able to pull lists of rosters. Regarding secure testers, some schools had trouble, but it was on their end and we were able to resolve it. We had no problem with network traffic once we implemented bandwidth shaping. During testing time, we made sure we had sufficient bandwidth allocated for those schools.
Anyone who actually remembers that testing, please let me know if she’s telling the truth about it happening “very smoothly.” I’ll go back and look for accounts myself when I get a chance. This goes without saying, but she let no one know — and the report does not mention — her personal investment in portraying how her system functioned to the state.
I know the rest of the School Board is much too lazy to care; but I want to ask Lynn Wilson if he’s ever been made aware of Heather Wright’s personal role in the development and administration of IBTP-related testing?
2. The IBTP questions that Heather Wright owns are perhaps the largest source of complaints and concerns for parents and teachers in Polk County. Many of them are, apparently, stupid.
Here’s one little example from a teacher’s email I received yesterday:
I also wanted to mention that during the last school year, I spent a day at the school board working on the EOY for Creative Writing (which I was teaching at the time). We were informed it needed to be multiple choice. I just remember asking several times how a multiple choice test measures how someone has grown in Creative Writing. They never ended up using our recommendations that year and it’s doubtful they ever will.
Yet, to reiterate #1, the IBTP and its questions are the crown jewel in Heather Wright’s career as an educrat, such as it is. It defines her. For her to admit flaws, for the Polk School District to reject her IBTP policies or pursue meaningful reform on anything related to the EoYs or IBTP is to reject Heather Wright.
So we’re all just gonna have to take this test machinery and like it — because if we don’t, she’s not going to move up to the cushy job she’s always had her eyes on with the state DoE or beyond.
3. Now, where does Wright’s personal interest in the EoC, EoY, and IBTP create an active incentive to punish our kids relative to other districts — rather than just an incentive not to change or take questioning? Honestly, I’m still working on that one. There must be a reason she’s so insistent on aligning the EoYs with EoCs and making both subject to the bizarre 95-85-75 scoring scheme. There must be a reason the School District insists on doing the opposite of St. Johns County and other more successful counties.
My first guess is that it stems from some requirement of the grant she brought with her from Osceola County related to IBTP work. I’m told that grant is worth $4.3 million. The story goes that she came to know Kathryn LeRoy somehow while working on this state IBTP project. And she convinced LeRoy to hire her as accountability director — a job for which she lacked qualifications — because she could bring the grant money with her. And apparently Osceola let her go — with the freaking grant money in tow! Infer from that what you will.
But I bet you can tie alignment of EoY, EoC, and IBTP to how Heather Wright gets paid, one way or another.
I’ve just requested and apparently received a copy of the grant. I know from experience such documents take serious reading. So I’ll follow up with anything in it that I find relevant. I also requested Wright’s travel records. I have heard rumblings that Wright spends a lot of time marketing IBTP to the right people.
Here’s the summary I got back.
Summary:
These trips are related to the Career/Technical Education grant that was awarded to the district. The IBTP was the software platform used by the CTE teachers to author and review test questions, so I’m including them as IBTP-related.TDA 15102
Date: January 14, 2015
Location: Lake Buena Vista, FL
Purpose: Central Florida Assessment Collaborative (CFAC) leadership meeting
Updating district stakeholders on progress of the CTE grant and the development of test questions
Cost: $0.00 (Since my home is located in close proximity to Lake Buena Vista, I did not submit for reimbursement for mileage)TDA 16500
Date: February 11, 2015
Location: Orlando, FL
Purpose: Central Florida Assessment Collaborative (CFAC) leadership meeting
Updating district stakeholders on progress of the CTE grant and the development of test questions
Cost: $0.00 (Since my home is located in close proximity to Orlando, I did not submit for reimbursement for mileage)TDA 18761
Date: March 26, 2015
Location: Lake Buena Vista, FL
Purpose: Central Florida Assessment Collaborative (CFAC) leadership meeting
Updating district stakeholders on progress of the CTE grant and the development of test questions
Cost: $5.00 (Since my home is located in close proximity to Lake Buena Vista, I did not submit for reimbursement for mileage. The $5.00 expenses were for a parking fee at the meeting location.)
Make of that what you will. I’m struck by Wright’s “Since my home is located in close proximity to Lake Buena Vista…”
Do you think she cares at all — one iota — about the impact of test machinery on a Polk County kid’s college admission or graduation or scholarship? Please. She does not live in “close proximity” to any of them or us.
Of fact and evidence
I read Jacque Bowen’s strange little blurb in The Ledger this morning fending us off.
“We’re employees. It’s not like a citizens’ group where you can vocally express your opinion. Anytime you ask for a written response, it has to be in a form that is factual.”
Indeed, I intend to keep talking about what’s factual. It starts with Heather Wright’s professional and personal dependence on jamming IBTP-enabled tests down our throats and ignoring criticism. Jacque Bowen might do well to acknowledge how personally compromised her colleague is in any discussion of testing. Jacque Bowen — and any other Jackie — might want to consider if it makes sense to hitch anything to Heather Wright’s wagon.
And here’s one more fact. At our meeting Thursday night, I intend to ask CBEL to make it a priority to force our district to immediately adopt St. Johns County’s test reforms.
This is what’s possible when abusive careerists aren’t running accountability.
We tried to work with you in good faith. You spit on us — and challenged us to come up with evidence. Fine. Game on. It starts with Heather. It’s up to the rest of you how much farther it goes.