19-02-2025
ECASD looks at middle school math performance, improvement plans in the district
EAU CLAIRE — For the Eau Claire Area School District, a focus has been on middle school math and continuing challenges with respect to recent state data.
As district administration had a chance to present on what their research tells them about Eau Claire's middle schools to the board, Director of Secondary Programming and Post Secondary Readiness Michelle Radtke said there is a positive trend in relation to state data.
'We are seeing an upward trend in middle school math and we are performing above the state,' she said, as data from the forward exam for Wisconsin middle schools showed ECASD performing with 57.5% of students meeting set benchmarks for the 2023-24 school year, compared to 54.3% at the state level.
But that does not necessarily paint the whole picture, as disaggregated data does show challenges with student groups within the ECASD. A good example of this is students with disabilities; the ECASD results of the forward exam showed roughly 10.1% meeting benchmarks for the 2023-24 school year, compared with an overall 15.0% for the state.
'While the state percentage shows a general upward trend for students with disabilities, ECASD middle schools have experienced some challenges with a declining trend in proficiency percentages,' said Radtke. 'The gap between the district and the state is widening negatively, with the state having a higher percentage of students meeting the benchmark over time.'
That challenge extends to visible gaps in the performance of Asian populations and White populations with performance. Identifying an underlying cause, Radtke said students facing economic disadvantages may have an impact on all demographics of students' performance in math.
'One of the things that we highlighted here is that economic status plays a huge role in a student's outcome in their ability to be successful in math,' she said. 'So what we have to do is figure out the root cause of what resources or tools they need to be successful if they come from a background of economically disadvantaged.'
A major part of that is working on the system as a whole, said Executive Director of Teaching and Learning Mandy Van Vleet.
'As I think about specifically middle school, we need to engage learners at that adolescent level to keep wanting to learn more and engage in math practice,' she said. 'It is kind of a critical age where kids either like math or they don't, and I think the student reps spoke to that. When students get disengaged in middle school, getting them through high school Algebra 1 and Geometry is really challenging. Particularly it is really important for our students to develop good math practice in elementary and also middle school.'
South Middle School Principal Caleb Hundt spoke to work that is being done at one of the district's schools. While South performed with a 61.1% overall on the forward exam, data still showed that the school faced similar challenges that the district as a whole faced when looking at student populations.
'We want to work together to engage kids, we want to ask better questions and we also want to have more teaching and also more learning in more classrooms — more of the time,' said Hundt.
With that focus, Hundt said there are five pillars adopted at South: shared leadership, the art and science of teaching, implementation of avid and PBIS structures (Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports), putting in building thinking classrooms, which is a math focus but has been a process for all teachers; and also something called a walkthrough triad where they get to see three other teachers and meet them during their prep time.
For the district as a whole, Radtke said there are three areas which they are focusing on for improvement in regards to middle school math.
'The three areas that we are focusing on as a district for our teachers is creating a guaranteed and viable curriculum, so no matter who teaches it, students have the same outcomes of that curriculum,' she said. 'The second one would be instructional delivery, which is teachers using strategies to effectively create effective environments for our students to learn in for math. And professional learning would be that third one, we keep providing that professional development and collaboration around math for our teachers.
'Our goal is to have all of our systems that support, in this case, a strong math program in place,' said Van Vleet. 'That is what we have been building over the last few years, are systems that support those structures. Whether that is the resources and materials that our teachers are using, improving their practices as instructors in the classroom, providing them with professional learning, providing them opportunities to collaborate with one another and learn from each other, layering on the additional supports like interventions when students are not hitting benchmarks — all of those pieces are part of creating a strong system. That is what we have been working on hard these last few years, is putting those systems in place.'
