Lakewood CARES will be providing an academically based response to schools highlighted in the Clover Park School District (CPSD) "#SuperSchoolShoutOut" articles in The Suburban Times. This is data you will not find elsewhere in CPSD public relations pieces, School Board meeting agendas or "Inside Schools". This week's CPSD "beaming with pride" article covers Four Heroes Elementary School which was featured in a Suburban Times article on 5 October 2024:
Four Heroes is an example of the desperate academic situation at many CPSD schools. Unfortunately, you'd never know just how Four Heroes is doing academically from the above linked CPSD public relations (PR) article. This PR policy of limiting school coverage to 1 teacher and 1 student obscures both the district's many academic failures and true successes from public view. Such PR articles are the equivalent of "participation trophies" that bring every school to the same nondescript level. Perhaps that's the intent. That's "equity" for you.
Four Heroes is failing academically and has been since its foundation in 2018. Since 2018 Four Heroes has been ranked at an average percentile of 7.4 (%) academically: 92.6% of Washington State elementary schools have outperformed it academically over that time. The 2024 academic ranking was 9.6%, down from 12.4% in 2023.
https://www.schooldigger.com/go/WA/schools/0141003516/school.aspx
Compare Four Heroes academic ranking (9.6%) with that of all CPSD schools (25%) to get some idea of where they stand academically today. This disparity has been going on for the last six years with no effective academic improvement.
https://www.schooldigger.com/go/WA/district/01410/search.aspx
The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction's (OSPI) statistics back up this academic ranking.
https://reportcard.ospi.k12.wa.us/ReportCard/ViewSchoolOrDistrict/105893
Four Heroes scored the following in "students meeting state standards" (now re-labeled by OSPI, confusingly, as "Students on track for college level learning without remedial classes"): Spring 2024: ELA: 32.7%, Math: 22.6%, Science: 22.5%.
There is a new metric, "Students Showing Foundational Grade Level Knowledge and Skills or Above", added to the OSPI report card. If you thought this was a new name for "students meeting state standards" you'd be wrong. This OSPI "sleight of hand" added schools performing below grade level to schools at or above grade level. During the recent CPSD School Board workshop (23 September 2024) Brian Gabele, Director of Assessment and Program Development, said these under performing schools deserve to be recognized for learning something: "...they are not illiterate"! When standards are lowered everyone tends to look good. I have not addressed these statistics because they are new, based upon lowered standards, inflated and with no relationship to past academic metrics.
Unfortunately, Four Heroes attendance rate of students attending 90% or more school days is 51.4%! This may be a significant factor in the school's low academic performance. For instance, Beachwood Elementary School's attendance rate is 79.3% and academic ranking is 90.1%. There seems to be a correlation between attendance and academic performance. You can't learn if you don't attend.
Four Heroes Student Growth Percentile (SGP) rating offers some hope. Despite its low academic performance it has exhibited somewhat surprising growth as well as racial and ethnic trends.
SGP scores for ELA (54%) and math (49.5%) are right at the median of 50% and show that Four Heroes students are maintaining their growth position relative to other schools; they are not losing or gaining ground academically with peer group schools. However, given that they are ranked so low academically to begin with, it will require far more growth over a long time to significantly cut into that academic deficit. It's not just how fast schools grow academically but rather the start point of that academic growth. Four Heroes and many other CPSD schools have a lot of academic ground to make up.
These SGP statistics reveal some surprising relationships between growth, race and ethnicity. The oft expressed "truism" of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) proponents is that Whites have some sort of built-in "privilege" which academically results in "disparities" between Whites and minorities. Yet as shown on the above chart that is not necessarily the case! White growth may outperform Blacks in ELA but Black growth in math outperforms Whites by an even greater margin. Such "swaps" in disparities occur across all races and ethnicities. This contradicts the DEI assertion that somehow minorities consistently under perform Whites, allegedly because of racism, and thus need preferential treatment to "catch up". This is apparently not the case at Four Heroes!
OSPI defines "discipline rate" as "What percent of students are excluded in response to a behavioral violation?" "Exclusion" means suspensions or expulsions. Four Heroes disciplinary rate is 1.6% (2022/2023), similar to that of other elementary schools. This changes dramatically when elementary students transition into middle schools where the discipline rate can jump by a factor of 10! This phenomenon needs investigation. "Tweens" and teens can be a handful, but schools have to find a way to ameliorate this phenomenon to establish a safe and stable environment for learning. Otherwise, any academic proficiency and growth attained in elementary school may be compromised as the student steps over the middle school threshold.
Four Heroes is one of several elementary schools that feed into Lochburn Middle School which has the 2024 academic ranking of 0.4%: 533 out of 535 Washington State middle schools. Lochburn's discipline rate (2022/2023) was 12.1% compared to Four Heroes' 1.6%, or 7.5 times greater. This represents a dire academic future for these elementary students who feed into Lochburn. Lochburn Middle School's academic situation can be found at:
NOTE: All Lakewood CARES Suburban Times articles back to 2021 are archived at the URL below for easy search and access.