ECRA Client Solutions Under COVID-19 Restrictions
This document describes how ECRA Group will support clients during these unprecedented times of remote teaching, learning, and school administration caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
John Gatta, Ph.D. is Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of ECRA Group. In addition to his responsibilities at ECRA Group, John is an Assistant Professor of statistics and predictive analytics at Northwestern University, where he also serves as Director of Research. His unique blend of academic, technical, management and leadership experience gives him keen insights into how schools can best adopt research and analytics as a core strategy for quality improvement. As CEO of ECRA Group, he also serves as chief architect of ECRA's analytic infrastructure related to data structures, data warehousing, statistical algorithms and reporting.
An ECRA Group message to School Administrators
First and foremost, on behalf of the ECRA Group team, I would like to thank you for your leadership through these unprecedented times. Your students and communities are relying on you!
Effect Sizes as Evidence – The single most important pitfall to avoid
Despite widespread use of effect sizes across industries as a standardized measure of impact, effect size calculations remain one of the most incorrectly applied and misinterpreted statistics. An effect size is nothing more than a standardized comparison, or “effect” , that captures the difference between an average value and a meaningful comparison in the metric of standard deviation.
Measuring Social and Emotional Learning
Social and emotional learning is about understanding who students are, not what they know. It’s internalizing an awareness that our biological systems are wired so that our emotions and interests drive our attention and, ultimately, our progress toward goals.
For chief executives, prioritizing SEL is a strategic issue. Effective implementation of SEL policies starts with the school district developing a clear and compelling vision for SEL that defines tangible outcomes the organization is striving to achieve.
Tell Your Story by Defining Success
The ability to articulate and substantiate a compelling story of student success and school quality ultimately speaks to the return on investment that schools provide the communities they serve. School quality and student success are a matter of definition. For years, federal policy has controlled the definition of student success and school quality as predominately how students perform on state assessments. As educators, we know there are many additional outcomes that predict student success and align closer to the values of local communities. The story of local school districts is more comprehensive than what state report cards capture.
The state report card is only part of the story – unless the missing parts are never told. Absent the rest of the story, the incomplete story told via the state report cards becomes the full story. The idea is to provide communities the full story.
The single most important pitfall for Illinois schools to avoid when interpreting ISBE Student Growth Percentiles (SGPs)
The Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) recently released student growth percentiles (SGPs) to Illinois school districts in preparation of the new school accountability system and the launch of the new Illinois school report card. While incorporating student growth into the school accountability system is a step in the right direction, it is important to recognize that ISBE SGP results are reported within an accountability context not a school improvement context.
ISBE Student Growth Percentile Model Under ESSA
Based on recent information provided by the Accountability Technical Advisory Committee’s (TAC) recommendations to ISBE, it is likely that ISBE will move away from linear regression toward Student Growth Percentiles (SGPs) as a means to measure student growth under the new school improvement and accountability system.
Linear Regression and the ISBE Growth Model
I’m getting a lot of questions related to linear regression and how the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) may implement linear regression to measure student growth under the new school improvement and accountability system. As a result, I decided to synthesize information as it becomes available.
Goal Setting for School Improvement
The fundamental purpose of setting school improvement goals is to assess the effectiveness of improvement efforts. The utility of the school improvement process rests on the inferences one can draw from meeting a goal. For example, a typical school improvement goal may be “increase the percentage of students meeting standards in grade 4 reading by 5%. While this type of goal is specific and concise, the results will provide little to no information as to the effectiveness of improvement efforts. Why? Because increasing grade 4 reading by 5% is likely an arbitrary goal that is unrelated to school performance and not evidence-based.
Ready or Not: A Broader Definition
Measuring student success requires moving beyond standardized test scores toward a multidimensional and personalized set of indicators that collectively capture a more modern definition of readiness, empowering students to take ownership of their learning by aligning competencies, interests, motivations and aspirations.