Gering Public Schools: The School District to Watch

Keep your eyes on the Gering Public Schools district in Northwest Nebraska.



Gering, a smallish 2,000 student district with 30% ethnic minorities (mostly non-ELL Hispanics) and with 43% of students on free/reduced lunch, was an underperforming school district back in 2002 when new district administrator, Don Hague, decided to do something drastic (and smart) with the district's new Reading First grant. Hague didn't just adopt a new research-based basal reading program for Gering, he didn't even adopt a research-validated reading program, he went whole hog and adopted a district-wide research-validated whole-school reform. Like I said, a smart move because most administrators would only have done the bare minimum needed, having the least amount of changes, to give the appearance they're doing something to solve the problem. Real reform requires more serious effort.

Hague also wisely chose, Direct Instruction (DI), as his whole-school reform and implemented the reform with the assistance of the National Institute of Direct Instruction (NIFDI). It's a wise choice because DI has a proven track record of success in grades K-3 along with some longitudinal data for grades 4 and 5. By adopting the whole-school version of DI, there is strong likelihood that Gering students will acquire all the fundamental skills they need for learning content area sbject matter starting in sixth grade.

After three years, Gering is already starting to see results.

Before implementing DI, there was a 23 point gap between Hispanic and white students in fluency benchmarks in second grade in the Gering. Last year, not only was the gap closed, a greater percentage of Hispanics met the fluency benchmark than did white students -- a -2% gap.

The district, not content waiting for the elementary students receiving DI to reach junior high, adopted the remedial DI reading program for its junior high students to improve their chances of succeeding in high school. After one year of remediation, Terra Nova scores went from a 39% pass rate to a 55% pass rate. That's an effect size of about 0.4 standard deviation (σ). Let's put that in perspective.

A 0.4σ improvement is about 60% better than the gains made in the Project Star class-size reduction study. And, in order to get similar gains via improving teacher effectiveness, you'd have to replace teachers with an average effectiveness at the 50^th percentile with super teachers performing at the 94^th percentile.

But, the best part about the intervention in Gering is that it will be producing a great deal of longitudinal data. Gering has four elementary schools. Each elementary school, and only those schools, feeds into a single junior high school. That junior high school, and only that junior high school, feeds into the sole high school. Hopefully, Gering will stick with the intervention for the next ten years or so, so the longitudinal data can be collected.

I've been in contact with Gering and NIFDI trying to get some additional data for the intervention and plan on reporting any results and answers I can get. In the meantime, take a look at the short documentary on Gering that was produced. Note in particular, the interviews with the teachers and the responses they give, especially with respect to the children's reactions to the intervention.

Continued in Second Post.

More Evidence that Good Instruction Can make a Big Difference

Last spring I reported on the Gering School District (Nebraska) which had taken their Reading First grant back in 2004 and, with the help of NIFDI, implemented the full-immersion Direct Instruction for Reading and Language Arts back in 2004 district wide.

Let's see what the results look like four years later now that that first cohort has reached 3rd grade. We can also take a look at the performance of the 4th - 6th grades who participated in the program for some of their school years. Also, we can take a look at the 7th and 8th grades that received a remedial version of the reading program only.

As you can see from my fancy Excel 2007 graph below, Gering students are now performing better than the Nebraska state average.

The blue bars on the left represents the mean performance of all students in Nebraska on the Nebraska state NCLB test (a test with an artificially high pass rate to be sure, but we are concerned here with relative performance). Nebraska is about 70% white and 25% Hispanic so the average performance of all students comprises mostly white students.

The red bars represent the performance of all Gering students which is higher than the Nebraska average in all grades. This is significant because the demographics of Gering are below the Nebraska average. (Adults are less educated and there is more poverty.)

Now let's take a look at the subgroup data to see who is making the progress.

The green and purple bars represent the performance of Hispanic and white students respectively. Both groups are performing better than the state average for all students in all grades but grade 5 where Hispanics perform slightly below. Gering Hispanics are actually performing better than Gering white students in grade 7 which is something you rarely see on a district wide basis and/or without selective admissions.

The light blue bars (on the right) represent the performance of students receiving free and reduced price lunches -- a proxy for poverty. Poor students in Gering perform better than the Nebraska average for all students (not just poor ones) with the except of grades 5 and 7. This is something you don't see everyday. I've run quite a few analyses like this for different states and I have yet to find an entire school district whose low-SES students performed above the state average for all students.

Apparently the effects of poverty and being a non-Asian minority can be mitigated through good instruction alone.

I challenge anyone to produce similar effects for their favored non-instructional intervention (on a District-wide basis without selective admissions) that produce effects similar to those found in Gering in grades 3-8.

I'll drill down deeper into the data in a future post.

More Gering Data

(Continued from previous post)

I know the in DI, they hit language instruction hard. Think of it as the "content" course you need before you get to the other content courses. Language is content.

Not unsurprisingly Gering is posting better language results.

Take for example example these scores from the Terra Nova Language test which show Gering fifth graders who received 3 yrs of DI language arts instructions compared to Gering seventh graders who did not.



That's even better than the reading scores.

How about some scores from Gering second graders on the Gates-MacGinitie Word Knowledge test.



The 2007 cohort received three years of DI instruction (grades K-2), the 2006 cohort received two years (grades 1-2), the 2005 cohort received 1 year (grade 2). Either the 2007 cohort had a lot of smart kids compared to the other cohorts or they learned a lot more words.

There's also been a lot of talk about NCLB causing schools to neglect the non-reading and non-math classes, such as social studies and science. Certainly, in DI a strong focus is placed on English Language Arts and Reading, but Gering doesn't appear to be suffering in these areas.



These are Terra Nova Science and Social Studies for 3rd and 4th grades. Remember you need to be able to read the tests in order to correctly answer questions. That point seems lost on many edu-pundits.

Finally, we turn to writing scores. The following scores show the improvement that Gering Hispanic students made in comparison to other Hispanic students in Nebraska as each cohort received more DI instruction in writing.



Gering went from significantly performing below the state average to performing better than the state average.

More Results Out of Gering

(This is the third post in the Gering Series.)

Thanks to the DI implementation and lots of hard work by the district, Gering Public Schools has managed to close some of the achievement gaps between Hispanic students and white students. In Gering, Hispanics represent a substantial minority of students, nearly 30%.

Here are Kindergarten scores from the DIBELS phoneme segment fluency test for Hispanic and white students before and after the DI implementation.



As you can see, the percentage of Hispanic students passing the test as increased by an amount sufficient to close the achievement gap with the white students whose pass rate has also increased.

Here are second grade scores from the DIBELS oral fluency test for Hispanic and white.



Again, note that white students have made significant gains compared to previous cohorts, but Hispanics have made even greater gains--gains sufficient to create a reverse achievement gap.

Bear in mind that closing the gap with respect to the number of students passing the benchmark is not the same as closing the achievement gap with respect to absolute achievement scores. It could be that the scores of white students are still higher than the scores of Hispanic students. I don't have data to report either way, at least not yet. But, keep in mind that NCLB is concerned with the closing the gap between the percentage of students meeting benchmarks, not with absolute scores.

This is how NCLB is supposed to work. Schools are supposed to be improving instruction such that student achievement is improved for all groups with the effect that more students from lagging groups will pass the benchmark and close he gap. This is how it is working in Gering.

(Continued)

Some Results Out of Gering

Following up on my previous post on Gering Public Schools which have implemented the whole school Direct Instruction (DI) reform with the help of The National Institute for Direct Instruction (NIFDI) beginning in the 2004-2005 school year. The intervention has been in place for three years so far and is beginning to generate some useful data.

The above graph shows DIBELS Nonsense Word Fluency (NWF) and Oral Reading Fluency (ORF) test data for grades K-6 from the spring of 2004 (before DI) and in the spring of 2007 (after 3 years of DI). These DIBELS tests are good predictors of the risk of student reading failure in subsequent grades. The graph shows the percentage of students meeting the benchmark goals. Meeting the benchmark indicates a low risk of reading failure.

The students in K-2 have been in DI since they began school. The students in gardes 3-5 have received three years of DI, i.e., for example the fifth grade students received DI in grades 3-5, but did not receive DI in grades K-2. The students in grade 6 only received a single year of DI in sixth grade.

As you can see from the graph, all grades, despite many students not receiving DI in each gradehave made substantial gains and their risk of reading failure has been significantly reduced. The kindergarten class of 2007, for example, is performing above the top 1 percentile based on these scores.

Here is a graph of grades 1-5 showing the performance of economically disadvantaged students on the same tests.



Not unsurprisingly, in 2007, the low-SES students in grades 1-5 outperformed the low-SES students in 2004. What is surprising is that the low-SES students in 2007 also outperformed all 2004 students in each grade, not just the low-SES students. That's impressive. So much for socio-economic status being a determining factor of academic success. With effective instruction, the predictive value of socio-economic status is diminished.

In case you were wondering how this performance translates to reading performance. Below is a graph of Terra Nova Reading scores for the fifth grade class of 2007 (which received only three years of DI instruction) with the performance of three cohorts of seventh graders who did not receive any DI instruction. Terra Nova is a nationally normed standardized test.



As you can see from the graph, the fifth graders who received three years of DI outperformed the seventh graders who did not.

Continued in third post.

Reasoning and Writing

One of the programs being used in Gering is the DI writing program Reasoning and Writing (RW). Here's an overview of the program.

Levels A and B get students ready for real writing. Level C concentrates on narrative writing. Level D focuses on expository writing. Levels D through F are no walk in the park, even for higher performing kids. In fact, I'll go so far to say that most people are never taught and never learn the skills taught in the latter levels of RW.

Most people are simply unable to critically example text or a presentation of information and construct a coherent argument based thereon. Reading blogs and the comments section makes this fact abundantly clear. And the demographic that engages in such activities is highly skewed at the top of the cognitive curve.

What I like about RW is that it teaches grammar and logic in the context of writing. As students learn grammar they immediately incorporate what they learn into their writing assignments. Every lesson has a writing assignment.

For example, by level C, lesson 89, students are learning how to properly use pronouns in writing (jack and Jill = they), how to punctuate a series of nouns (bat, ball and glove), and how to construct paragraphs with multiple people speaking (a paragraph per speaker). The writing assignment for this lesson is based on the following series of pictures.



The assignment is for the students to draft a multiple paragraph narrative based on the sequence of events that take place in pictures 1, 2, and 4, including what must have happened in missing picture 3.

The students start off by setting the scene by writing where the people were, what they were doing, and what was happening in the background in the first picture.

Ann, Maria, and Tony were sitting on a bench at a bus stop. A house was burning behind them and smoke poured out of the window. Tony said, "I smell smoke."

Next, the students write about what happened in the second picture.

They stood up and faced the building. Ann pointed to the window and said, "It's coming from over there."

Tony said, "There's a dog in that window."

Finally, the students write about what must have happened in the missing third picture and what happened in the last picture. The students have learned to identify the differences between the second and fourth picture to determine what must have happened in the missing third picture. In this example some differences are the location of the children, what they were doing, and the presence of Mrs. Wilson.

They went over to the window. Ann climbed onto Tony's shoulders, reached into the window, and grabbed the dog. Ann held the dog in her arms. Mrs. Wilson arrived home holding a bag of groceries. She said, "You saved King."

As she ran to a telephone booth, Maria said, "I'll call the fire department."

After the students complete the writing exercise, the class discusses some examples from the students' writing. The teacher notes some areas that the students should have included in their writing and some common errors. The students fix-up their writing and turn it i tothe teacher for review. The teacher reviews the writing by the next lesson and reviews the previous assignment in the beginning of the next lesson.

By the end of level C (lesson 110), students will be able to construct simple multi-paragraph narratives based on a sequence of events like this example.

As you can hopefully see, this lesson has far more instructional value that the typical journaling exercises elementary school students typically engage in.

And, yes, I wrote those paragraphs all by myself. The question is will my second grader do a better job than me when he does this exercise tonight.

Update: Here's what the boy wrote for this lesson. I only corrected a few spelling errors.

Ann, Maria and Tony were sitting on a bench at a bus stop. There was a house on fire behind them. "I smell smoke," said Tony.

Maria, Ann, and Tony stood up and looked behind them and saw a house on fire. "It's coming from over there", said Ann.

"There's a dog in that window," said Tony.

They ran to the house and Ann got on Tony's shoulders. Then Ann grabbed King while old lady Wilson came with groceries saying, "You saved King."

Maria ran to the telephone booth saying, "I'll call the fire department."