NWEA

She was so proud of herself because they took, um, a state test in Michigan.

They take the NWEA test, and, um, it's just a standardized assessment at school.

And she said, "I scored higher this time, Mom, than I ever did," and, you know, she was so proud of herself.

And, and I was proud, you know, because...

Right

... uh, particularly i-Ready, uh, from, um, I think it's, uh, Curriculum Associates is the, the owner of i-Ready, and the MAP test from NWEA.

The whole edifice amounts to a, anyw- estimated, extrapolated, um, and this is from EdFirst, amounts to anywhere between $3 and $5 billion just on spending on testing nationally.

So a lot of these tests are required by the districts beyond what the state does and beyond what the federal government does.

This week, Kimberly Ritchie, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education, joins us to discuss new federal guidance on school discipline and Title VI.

What does the department's new approach to racial discipline disparities mean for schools? Then on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a new NWEA study examining whether schools are getting Algebra 1 placement right and why students should be allowed to take Algebra as soon as they're ready for it.

All that and more this week on the Education Gadfly Show.

This is the Education Gadfly Show.

Well, are we going to talk about research today?

Well, we should.

We have a new research brief from our friends at NWEA, just always using their map data to just answer interesting questions.

So this time they are looking at math education policy via the lens of this study that asks, one, are students who are ready for eighth grade algebra actually enrolled in it? And two, does taking algebra in eighth grade rather than waiting until ninth grade actually improve student outcomes, which seems like questions we need answers to.

And during that time, one of the things that we talked about is how do we become more of an evidence-based culture? How do we kind of look at our scores and think about like, how is that impacting students? So with the help of ECRA, um, we, we met with the CEO and president John got a sort of saying like, I need to create some kind of goal that is going to move our district forward.

So we looked at, you know, the state assessments, the Illinois Assessment for Readiness, IAR, we looked at, we use NWEA, we use FastBridge, we use a lot of different assessments and measurements.

And I thought about like, okay, how do I build a goal around ELA that people could get like their minds wrapped around? And the state reports, the IAR reports, scores in our report card.

And that's what parents, that's what the public, that's all transparent information.

But I didn't have any other clarity about what kind of data I might need.

So again, thinking about if you have access to the book, obviously that has some suggestions in it, but also just thinking about this, the things like Scarborough's Rope are great resources to kind of help you think about what are the categories where I might be noticing what's going on here and giving yourself permission to use three forms of data, formal data from your screeners or other kind of like Big school tests, you know, if you have NWEA, iReady, whatever it is.

More informal data that you are collecting, which is data such as, did the kids learn what I taught this month? If you have given a unit assessment, if you have used something like an informal decoding inventory to see kind of where kids are at in phonics.

These assessments might not have been validated in some big study, but they're really critical for helping us understand a snapshot of where a reader is at.

Kids who can read every word on the page but lose the meaning the moment the materials get more sophisticated.

Let's start with Megan Kufelt, who studies growth modeling and data analytics at NWEA.

She holds a PhD in quantitative methods in education, and her research tracks how students' academic trajectories are shaped by their schools and neighborhoods over time.

Megan, welcome to the show.