From: School Vault

To: Mom and Dad

Subject: Junior’s academic performance

Hello. I’m School Vault. I’m criticized as being burdensome and expensive. But once you get to know me, I think you’ll see advantages to an entirely new way of measuring your child’s progress.

Teachers use me to track the performance of individual students or the class as a whole.

Students have access to me to do homework assignments or prepare for pop quizzes.

When you parents have your own portal – tentatively scheduled for next year – you won’t have to wait weeks for a report card to see how your child is doing; you can see the results of work done from the previous day in real time. You can use the information to tutor at home.

Teachers also will know how their classes are performing and will give extra attention to areas of classwide or individual weaknesses.

The rationale for rapid reaction to educational challenges is the same as when a faucet begins to leak: The sooner it’s discovered, the quicker it can be fixed.

I’m going to refer to myself hereafter in the third person.

Individually tailored, at a cost

It’s time to explain why School Vault makes sense financially. The concept and particulars are being developed by administrators and teachers in the Bayfield School District and Durango School District 9-R. Foraker Labs of Boulder is writing the computer codes.

The Foraker work cost the district $1.7 million, but $840,000 was covered by donations from the Colorado Department of Education, the Gates Family Foundation and private sources.

It was not inexpensive. But the district was paying Northwest Evaluation Association $46,000 annually for four years of evaluation, plus the cost of implementation, $277,500. It also paid Alpine Achievement Systems $400,725 from 2001 to 2014 for storage of data.

School Vault, however, is proprietary. The two school districts own it and will be able to charge others for its use. One Front Range district – Platte Canyon – already is on board, and seven other districts, including Pueblo School District 60, the largest in the state, are discussing a partnership with the developer.

A preview of what parents will see online in School Vault is difficult to describe in words.

But let’s try.

Grading the three Rs and art

Take third-grade math. Parents will find online a Pacing Guide that covers the topics students will see during the year.

Students start by learning the properties and structure of our number system, such as rounding numbers to the nearest 10 or 100, addition and subtraction involving numbers under 1,000 and multiplying one-digit numbers by multiples of 10.

In successive weeks, they begin to learn fractions, more advanced multiplication and division, graph measurement, geometric figures, calculation of area, liquid volumes, the mass of objects and time intervals.

Freshman reading, writing and communicating has its own Pacing Guide to monitor students collectively or individually.

Students are required to engage in oral expression and listening, initiate and participate in discussions, read literature for universal themes, demonstrate comprehension of literary, informational and persuasive texts and master techniques of the same, gather and evaluate information to answer complex questions and demonstrate strategies and techniques to comprehend difficult texts.

Students studying art or graphic arts might have to demonstrate their grasp of perspective drawing – representing three-dimensional images on a two-dimensional plane.

Defining perspective drawing isn’t sufficient. So a teacher could take a video of a student demonstrating the concept to classmates.

One standard, districtwide

Teachers have contributed to the development of assessment items and tasks that can be shared across all districts and schools that use School Vault.

They have taken three training sessions, including a four-day marathon at Fort Lewis College, on development of standards to evaluate students fairly.

The outcome is important because under U.S. Senate Bill 191, 50 percent of their own evaluation depends on how well their students do. In 9-R, teachers decided, the 50 percent would be proportioned among student/teacher goals in a specific class, schoolwide student achievement, semester tests, meeting Pacing Guide goals and how well students do in subjects tested statewide.

The other 50 percent of a teacher’s grade is evaluation by a supervisor or the superintendent.

Monitoring student achievement in real time is critical because children entering sixth grade this year must master reading, writing, math, science and social studies in order to graduate. No excuses.

Up to now, students could squeeze by with less than full mastery of subjects.

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School Vault is not without its detractors

Elementary education has fallen into the hands of data gatherers instead of teachers, a critic of School Vault said Friday.
School Vault involves excessive testing, stealing valuable time from contact with educators, it is unproven, and it is causing huge morale problems, said Betsy Kimmick, who spent nearly 30 years as a teacher, 17 of them at Riverview Elementary School.
“It sounds fabulous, but it spends too much time gathering data, and for what purpose?” Kimmick said. “We’ve lost teacher aides, the gifted program and librarians.
“School Vault threatens instructional integrity,” Kimmick said.
Sharon McAnear, who taught 20 years in Durango School District 9-R and seven years elsewhere, largely in early-childhood education, said testing before age 8 goes against established research.
“The brain is developing at that age,” McAnear said. “Testing at that age doesn’t give reliable responses.
“Children are developing physically, mentally, emotionally and socially. There are so many other things they should be doing. We don’t want students who don’t like school.
“I don’t believe that children over the ‘magic’ age of 8 years should endure undue amounts of assessment, either,” she said.
McAnear cited the Finnish education system that stresses self-directed activities that stretch creativity, develop language and teaches cooperation and self-control.
There is a backlash nationally against testing, propelled by top-down policy and programs, said Dan Snowberger, Durango School District 9-R superintendent. Rebellious districts and states risk losing federal financial support, he said.
“But the push-back that all testing is bad, just isn’t so,” Snowberger said. “We have to make sure that students are learning what we teach.”
School Vault is designed to learn through quick quizzes today what has to be taught tomorrow, Snowberger said.
There is discussion in academic circles that if school districts meet educational goals, they won’t have to give state tests, Snowberger said.
School districts need an assessment system that gives the real-time guidance provided by School Vault, Snowberger said. A state assessment that arrives weeks later is an autopsy, he said.
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If you go

Durango School District Superintendent Dan Snowberger and members of the school board will answer questions from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday at the Durango Public Library. Breakout sessions will allow the audience to see School Vault in operation.