Recent Exeter Newsletter Article

In a recent Exeter Newsletter article entitled, CMS Educators Want Improved Curriculum, Lara Bricker outlined a discussion at the December 10, 2007 meeting of the Exeter Region Cooperative School Board.  For the most part, Ms. Bricker is accurate with not only her description of Dr. Cronin's report of student performance on the NWEA assessments, but of the actual exchange at the board meeting as well.  

There is one part of her article, however, which should be expanded upon.  In the article, Ms. Bricker writes that, "Cronin's analysis revealed that high achieving students at the middle school are the only group of students that meets or exceeds the growth of their peers in similar school systems across the country.  Their growth has been the same regardless of the type of instructional grouping they have been placed in, he said, meaning that flexible grouping or leveling did not produce noticeable differences in student growth"

While it is agreed that Dr. Cronin's report did show that our high achieving students did perform better relative to their control group than our middle and low achieving students did relative to their respective control groups,  it is real important to refer specifically Dr. Cronin's report for a complete description of his analysis of grouping at CMS.  Starting on page 10 of Dr. Cronin's report:

The grouping arrangements in place today work substantively better for high achieving students than low achievers.  In reading and language usage, the flexible grouping arrangement produced better growth for high achievers than the ability grouping arrangements.  Low achieving students have shown poor growth in the flexible grouping arrangement, but did not show substantively better results in ability grouped situations.  In mathematics, the current course assignments produce excellent growth with high achieving students in grades seven and eight, although growth has slipped this past year.  This assignment system has produced poor results with low achieving students and these results have declined further during the most recent school year. 

This leads to the general conclusion that decisions about grouping per se may not have much to with the results produced by the middle school.  The school employes flexible grouping arrangements for reading and groups by achievement in mathematics.  These "conflicting" arrangements have both worked relatively well for high performers and both work very poorly for low performers.  Thus simply making a change in grouping arrangements, whether toward or away from ability grouping, without a constellation of changes that are targeted more directly at improving the quality of curriculum and instruction, is unlikely to make much difference.

It's important to understand that Dr. Cronin concluded that improvements to curriculum and instruction (and we would include assessment) will have a greater impact on student achievement than grouping.  That is why the CMS community is excited to proceed with meaningful discussions about teaching and learning, discussions that we feel will make an impact on student achievement.  In short, we couldn't agree more with the first line of Ms. Bricker's article (with our own addendum in brackets).

"Teachers and administrators at the Cooperative Middle School want to take the school's curriculum [instruction and assessment] from good to great."  

We are dedicated to continual improvement at CMS and look forward to the process of moving from Good to Great.