At the School Committee meeting Wednesday night (1/19/11) with the Selectman and Finance Committees of Dennis and Yarmouth, Superintendent Woodbury spent a great deal of time espousing all of the phenomenal achievements of the DY district. She told everyone how great our students scored on SATs (better than state and national averages) and she showed MCAS scores that have steadily increased nearly every year since inception.
Today, I decided to do a little research of my own. The DESE website shows different numbers for Grade 10 MCAS results than Ms. Woodbury stated. The DESE reported that students who scored Proficient or Advanced on English Language Arts was 84 – not 86, as Ms. Woodbury reported. DESE reported that students who scored Proficient or Advanced on Math was 79 – not 83, as Ms. Woodbury reported. DESE reported that students who scored Proficient or Advanced on Science was 82 – not 84, as Ms. Woodbury reported.
I haven’t been able to locate the 2010 SAT scores for our district because the DESE only shows the 2009 scores. Interestingly, the 2009 scores are significantly lower than the 2010 scores (Reading was 488 in ’09, compared to 516 in ’10; Math was 480 in ’09, compared to 529 in ’10; and Writing was 501 in ’09, compared to 507 in ’10) – so apparently, during the year that our district dropped to a Level 3 district, our SAT scores show a meteoric and remarkable improvement! I cannot contest the numbers because 2010 average scores are not reported yet; however, given the discrepancies I continuously find in Ms. Woodbury’s reported numbers, it does give me pause.
After Ms. Woodbury finished her presentation, Mr. Edwards asked her to clarify what it means to be a “Level 3” school. Contrary to all of the information she had just shared about the multitude of ways in which the district is outperforming state and national averages – she said that the district is Level 3 because our schools haven’t performed well enough for state standards [I’m paraphrasing here] and that, as a result, the DESE – or actually the DSAC (District and School Assistance Center) are now “our best friends”.
Again, this is concrete evidence of the district’s inability to meet (and certainly to exceed) the state’s thresholds for performance.
I have put together the following list of measurable performance indicators which I found most interesting. Only Harwich and Provincetown have lower graduation rates than DY. Only Mashpee and Provincetown have higher drop-out rates, and DY is tied with Provincetown for the worst attendance rates on the Cape. Given all of this, I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that DY has the lowest matriculation rate to 4-year colleges. We are worse than state averages in EACH category.
| Graduation Rate | Drop-Out Rate | Attendance Rate | Matriculation to 4-yr College | |
| STATE AVERAGE | 81.5 | 9.3 | 94.6 | 57% |
| Barnstable | 81.6 | 8.3 | 93.6 | 52% |
| Bourne | 84 | 7.4 | 94.4 | 61% |
| Chatham | 87.9 | 8.6 | 95.2 | 59% |
| Dennis-Yarmouth | 78 | 10.3 | 93.1 | 48% |
| Falmouth | 81.8 | 7.8 | 93.8 | 57% |
| Harwich | 77.6 | 10.3 | 94 | 61% |
| Mashpee | 79.5 | 15.4 | 95.1 | 57% |
| Nauset | 89.4 | 3 | 93.2 | 60% |
| Provincetown | 71 | 16.1 | 93.1 | 59% |
| Sandwich | 92.3 | 3.3 | 95.1 | 68% |
Oftentimes, when Superintendent Woodbury is questioned about such indicators, she points out that Yarmouth is not like other communities on the Cape. She points to the district’s high free and reduced lunch program students (aka, low-income students). This has always fascinated me. In a time when our unemployment rate is over 9% and more and more families likely qualify for free or reduced lunch programs – is it really fair and realistic to assume that children whose families qualify for free or reduced lunch are just plain “uneducable” or less able to perform because their parents earn less? I challenge Ms. Woodbury to look in the eyes of parents who have lost their jobs (often professional people who heretofore made ample livings) and tell them that now that they qualify for free or reduced lunch, their children are about to get really stupid. This is obviously an absurd concept, but it is the statistic which is most often blamed for poor measurable performance indicators.
The reality is that this district is dying. The increase in school sending numbers tells the story. Ms. Woodbury would have the public believe that this is a very complicated issue and almost impossible to nail down any concrete, reliable numbers. Well, since the district pays tuition to the charter schools and the other public schools to which our students transfer, and those tuition figures are based on actual concrete numbers (tuition which nears the $2 million mark, by the way) — forgive me for my naiveté, but it really isn’t that complicated. The reality is that the Superintendent doesn’t like to address those concrete numbers publicly because they are not flattering. However unflattering though, they tell the whole story.
I have gathered some rather extensive research on this subject and am including a spreadsheet which shows what I’ve learned. There are two districts from whom I am still awaiting the information, so I will update the spreadsheet as I receive it. The table below may be easier to view here: Out of School Sending
| Sending District | # of Students Enrolled | # to Charters | # to Public Districts | Total # Sending | # Receiving | Net # Sending | Net % Sending | # of High School | % of High School |
| Barnstable
Bourne |
4,153
2,302 |
103
43 |
74
30 |
177
73 |
78
42 |
99
31 |
2.38%
1.35% |
0.00%
0.00% |
|
| Chatham | 691 | 9 | 55 | 64 | 203 | -139 | -20.12% | 41 | 64.06% |
| Dennis Yarmouth | 3,199 | 139 | 304 | 443 | 70 | 373 | 11.66% | 225 | 50.79% |
| Falmouth | 3,710 | 59 | 24 | 83 | 35 | 48 | 1.29% | 19 | 22.89% |
| Harwich | 1,333 | 33 | 195 | 228 | 147 | 81 | 6.08% | 86 | 37.72% |
| Mashpee | 1,767 | 26 | 46 | 72 | 4 | 68 | 3.85% | 18 | 25.00% |
| Nauset | 1,526 | 92 | 34 | 126 | 240 | -114 | -7.47% | 26 | 20.63% |
| Provincetown | 125 | 9 | 43 | 52 | 25 | 27 | 21.60% | 20 | 38.46% |
| Sandwich | 3,432 | 53 | 39 | 92 | 21 | 71 | 2.07% | 23 | 25.00% |
| Wareham | 3,084 | 20 | 31 | 51 | 46 | 5 | 0.16% | 15 | 29.41% |
The first column shows the total number of students enrolled in each district. The second column shows the number of each district’s students who choose to attend a charter school. The third column shows the number of each district’s students who choose to attend a different public school district. I then added those two numbers together to get the total number of students each district sends to other schools (and these numbers do NOT include those who choose to attend private schools). I showed the number of students each district receives from other districts and then showed the net, by subtracting that number from the total number of out-of-school sent students. For an accurate perspective, I quantify that number in percentage figures.
The final two columns were very interesting – and the most difficult to track down. I called each school district to get the number of high school students in their district who choose to attend another public district high school and added that number to the number of charter high school students. The final column shows the percentage of out-of-school sent students who transferred at the high school level.
The only district (so far) with a higher percentage loss of high school students is Chatham and that also speaks to my theory. Chatham’s inability to provide a sound education at the high school level is the primary reason for their regionalizing with Harwich and it is no coincidence that 37 of the 41 high school, school choice students left Chatham to attend Nauset.
The reason I feel this is relevant is that, I believe, the primary motivation for a parent to place their child in a different high school is based on the performance of the sending school. Surely, there are some other reasons, but many of those reasons would have likely existed in elementary and middle schools. Colleges look at high school performance only when considering whether or not to accept incoming freshmen. Parents who expect their children to excel and/or to attend a 4-year college are more apt to opt to transfer their child to a higher performing school when it matters – at the high school level.
Irrefutable fact: Sturgis has been approved for a 400-student expansion and has obtained property to open a second campus (see the article printed on the front page of the Cape Cod Times today, Sturgis Charter School set to expand ). At this time, DY has 54 students wait-listed to attend Sturgis. Now that Sturgis has obtained a location to open a second campus, that number will surely grow. Sturgis Charter School is a high-performing school with very stringent requirements. I don’t believe it’s unreasonable to assume that the students from DY who choose to attend Sturgis are high-achieving students.
Likewise, we lose a large number of our high school students to Nauset – another better-achieving high school than DY.
By losing so many of our highest achieving students, all of our measurable performance indicators are negatively affected. There are far fewer high scores to offset the low scores. High achievers tend to miss school less and are tardy less often. Their graduation rates and drop-out rates are obviously dramatically better than other students and, it stands to reason, their matriculation to 4-year schools is much higher than their lower-achieving counterparts.
Bottom line is that the majority of the students we are losing to other districts and to charter schools are leaving at the high school level – which, it can be assumed, means that a large percentage of the students we are losing, are high achievers.
As we lose more and more high achieving students, it means that a disproportionate percentage of our budget is spent on special education and English language learning students – which looks fairly attractive to parents of special needs and English language learning children – so the district becomes, each year, more of a magnet for those students. In turn, we continue to find it more difficult to meet state thresholds for performance. Hence, the Level 3 status of our district. DY is the only district on the Cape with a Level 3 status. This is NOT an accident, it is NOT because we have the most free/reduced lunch or low-income families.
It is also reasonable to assume that when Sturgis opens its second campus, our out-of-school sending numbers will see a dramatic increase. Ms. Woodbury made a very valid point (although she made the point in an effort to convince the Yarmouth Selectmen that they need to authorize her to apply for funds from the state to renovate Mattacheese Middle School) Wednesday night when she stated, “If you build it, they will come”, referring to the regionalization of Chatham and Harwich and the new high school which will be built to house the Chatham/Harwich students. Even she knows that we are likely to lose a number of our students to the new high school. Sadly, since DY is the newest school on the Cape and just saw a huge renovation in the past few years – but also continues to see increasing out-of-school sending numbers – I’m not sure one can truly conclude that parents move their children at the high school level to the newest school around!
The Superintendent is proposing that the best way to address the Level 3 status of this district is to hire “coaches” (teachers to teach our teachers how to teach). Yet, she has often pointed out that we have the highest qualified teachers on the Cape. Something doesn’t add up. What does add up, is an increase in the budget to pay salaries for more teachers when we have fewer students to teach.
It is my strong conviction that change needs to take place immediately if there is any hope of revitalizing the DY district.
First and foremost, there are two School Committee positions up for election in May. We need to find candidates who are courageous, who are not “seducable” (those who run on a strong platform for change, but join the Committee and immediately begin to drink the Superintendent’s Kool-Aid of conformity) and who are willing to take a stand for what is truly best for the children of Dennis and Yarmouth. We need candidates who are willing to address the district’s overspending and the impact it has on the towns; the lack of attention to the curriculum; the continuing outflow of students to other schools; the lack of receptiveness to hearing public opinion and the arrogance toward the will of the voters.
The next step that I am convinced needs to occur is that, in July, when Ms. Woodbury’s contract is up for renewal – this district needs to find a new Superintendent who is similarly courageous enough and who has the vision to recognize that our district is dying and who is equipped and qualified to revitalize it and make the changes necessary to the old “status quo” to lure back the high achieving students we are currently losing and make our district’s schools safe environments for learning. We need a Superintendent who believes that every child is capable of learning and that we have a responsibility to teach them.
Those two important steps are crucial to implementing the third: this district must renegotiate the Collective Bargaining Agreement with the MTA to put an end to teacher professional status (aka, tenure) and to implement merit-based pay for all employees. It is time to take advantage of the increasing momentum in the country right now to creatively rework the teachers’ contract so that the benefits (15 sick days in a 184-day year, for instance) our towns must pay for don’t bankrupt our towns and put the final nail in the coffin of our school district once and for all.
We’ve all heard the expression, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig” and every voter, every Town Selectman, every Finance Committee member, every parent and every School Committee member needs to remember that the next time they sit through a gruelingly long presentation by Carol Woodbury, when the contents of that presentation are nothing more than “putting lipstick on a pig.”
DY Voice of Reason 