MASSP News Center

By Jim Ballard

MASSP Executive Director

Thursday morning I sat through a meeting with association and school district public relations/communication folks, along with MDE and CEPI staff. The topic was the soon-to-be-released Four-Year Cohort Graduation Rates. The Class of 2007 was the first class to be monitored by the state for four continuous years. It is anticipated that the reported graduation rate for this class will be around 77%. This is below the state AYP expectation of 80%, and well below the rate reported by many school districts. It is anticipated that every district in the state will need to explain a significant drop in their graduation rate to their communities when compared to previous years.

The question being addressed is how do we tell the story to the public without damage to Michigan Schools and/or your respective high school. It was said, “no one understands the issue.” “Oh, contraire,” I said. “Building administrators know what’s at stake; failure to meet Adequate Yearly Progress and their job.”

I learned that in addition to the cohort score reported by CEPI they can give you what is the graduation rate for those students who have been in your school for the entire four years. I believe this group’s rate will be much high than the cohort group. So I requested the two groups be reported together. I took the discussion to reporting the impact of the special education subgroup. I was jumped on because this would “demonize” special education students. True, but when I talk about this issue with principals I consistently hear it is this subgroup that “costs” the school from making AYP. So I requested on behalf of secondary principals that the communications people find a way, when reporting the CEPI data, to explain the impact of the subgroups on the outcome.

Time will tell.

Oh, the phone is ringing about MME retakes. It doesn’t appear to be going so smoothly. Calls range from

• Questions about voucher distribution.
• When to order materials?
• Why do students have to take the whole test?
• Do the kids realize that in some schools this is required for graduation?
• Where to go in the Department to fix the N/A behind some students name that is not correct?
• Why are students limited to one retake?
• Who should take the test in the Fall and who should wait for the Spring?

We’re working on reducing the retakes. This was our goal in the beginning. Our hope is to have one MME testing window – the spring test time. In addition, we’re part of a coalition of people who are preparing to mount an effort to reduce the wrap-around portions of MME significantly.

While we’re on testing, we have some issues with career technical education assessment. These students are supposed to show growth in CTE by using the MME. Only one test? In the spring of their first year in the program? Doesn’t make sense to us.  What would make sense would be to have students take the Workkeys® again in the senior year to be able to track progress from one year to the next. We’re hoping for a change here.