Information From May 21st Meeting on K-5 Interventions for General Education Students

Our pilot School StatNet meeting was held in Marlborough on Tuesday, May 21st, 2013, from 8:30 a.m. until 12:30 p.m.

Topic: The meeting topic was systems of intervention and support for general education students in grades K-5. The group reviewed summarized data relating to the types of interventions the participant districts provide, such as out-of-school academic support, in-school support, and wrap-around services. See here for an agenda.

Attendees: The following cities and/or districts sent representatives to the meeting. Orange-Mahar, Westborough, Boston, Attleboro, Revere, Somerville, New Bedford, Chicopee, Watertown, Holliston, Everett, Springfield, and Advanced Math and Science Academy. In addition, representatives from other organizations participated, including the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the Collins Center at UMass Boston, the Office of the State Auditor, Key Steps, EOE's Edwin team, EOE Secretariat, and A&F.

Take aways: Participant feedback and take-aways from the meeting are summarized here. A key lesson learned from the meeting was the difficulty all of the participating districts experience in evaluating the impact of different interventions. Among the ideas proposed to address this concern were:

• Look into the possibility of the State or some other consortium building a student information system that also tracks dosage for interventions.
• Look into resources that districts might use to strengthen their program evaluation capacity. Ideas mentioned include a centralized team of analysts who could help districts, training or tutorial on the "return on academic investment model" that was discussed, and help for districts on how to put systems in place (in terms of protocol, staffing, or technology) to implement performance management.

Possible future topics of interest: The group discussed together what topics they'd like to feature at future School StatNet meetings. Those included:

• Systems of defining school quality
• Early learning and kindergarten readiness strategies
• Educator evaluation system implementation
• District Determined Measures (DDMs) creation and how we use classroom-level growth data
• Operations topics, such as busing, food service, nursing, facility maintenance, and custodial services
• Continuing discussion of systems of performance management within districts
• School-based improvement planning processes
• Collaborative effort to cost out interventions and potentially compare return on academic investment

Materials: Linked below are presentations made by staff from Springfield and Boston on their performance management programs:

• Presentation on Springfield Public Schools' Performance Management Program
• Presentation on Boston Public Schools' Performance Management Program

Links: Attendee Sarah Glover, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, provided these links as a follow-up to the discussion:

Resources related to data sharing with providers to support program evaluation:

• A list of resources compiled by the Harvard Family Research Project   
• HFRP’s April newsletter, which is dedicated to topic of data sharing: 

And a tool to help with determining whether to keep a program or not: