Submitted by John Arbeeny.
Each week as a public service Lakewood CARES will be providing the real academic situation in response schools highlighted in the Suburban Times by Clover Park School District (CPSD). This is data you will not find elsewhere in CPSD propaganda pieces, Board meeting agendas or “Inside Schools”. All this talk about pride without addressing the reality of academic performance is “false pride” designed by the District’s “spin doctors” to keep the public in the dark. This week’s CPSD “beaming with pride” covers Thomas Middle School.
In the spring of 2023 only 38.2% of Thomas Middle School students met State standards for English Language Arts (ELA), 18.8% for math and 24.3% for science. That’s an average of about 27% of students who met all State standards in these three critical basic education subject areas. To put it another way: 73% of Thomas Middle School students failed to meet State standards. This data comes directly from the Office of Superintendent for Public Instruction (OSPI). Unfortunately at CPSD there appears to be more emphasis on changing “culture” via the “Four Pillars” rather than increasing academic success via the “Three R’s”. I’d suggest that CPSD fix its academics and the “culture” will take care of itself.
https://washingtonstatereportcard.ospi.k12.wa.us/ReportCard/ViewSchoolOrDistrict/102237
Schooldigger is a source of academic trends going back to 2015 which are not provided by the annual OSPI “snapshot” year to year. Indeed OSPI deletes previous year academic performance from its website “report card” with no easy way to retrieve such data! I have to wonder why! Thus Schooldigger and other such sites are invaluable in determining educational trends for CPSD and its schools. Schooldigger trends are based upon OSPI data.
https://www.schooldigger.com/go/WA/schools/014100027/school.aspx?t=tbRankings#google_vignette
So where does Thomas Middle School stack up against all middle schools in the State? It is ranked 438th out of a total of 539 middle schools: 19% (percentile) which is to say 81% of the State’s middle schools outperform Thomas Middle School academically. This is a trend in the wrong direction. In 2022 it was ranked at 30% and plummeted a significant 11% in just one year as compared with all other middle schools statewide. Thomas Middle School has the dubious honor of being the District’s “best” middle school academically at 19% when compared to Hudtloff Middle School (10%) and Lochburn Middle School (2%).
There is nothing in these statistics to take pride in. Indeed it is regrettable. Is there any wonder that when middle school students are this far behind in basic education that their future in high school becomes even more bleak? All kinds of excuses can be made by CPSD apologists: blame race, ethnicity, family situation, economics, students, parents, etc. But in the end CPSD’s failure academically lies directly in the lap of Superintendent, Board and staff for an educational system that is designed to fail and fail it does. Until that changes, academic performance will not improve.
LakewoodCARES.org
Dear Mr. Arbeeny,
I understand how deeply upset LakewoodCARES is about not having found quality candidates to run for the three open positions on the school board. Your claims that your organization is a “mega brain” collection of members with the educational experience to run our schools is a farce and a total ego trip; apparently the word is out to the greater Lakewood community. Not many want to step forward and even claim they are active members in your group or have received your political help! That is quite odd for a community nonprofit who likes to brag about their highly qualified members.
David Anderson and Paul Wagemann have presented your prepared data analysis ad nauseum for over the last two years. It has been embarrassing to watch the real experts debunk those claims. Public records requests show that you have very much tried to be an unelected 6th member on our school board. I suggest you stick to advising political friends; although that also doesn’t seem to be going in a positive direction at this time. Have you thought of retiring? I understand you are a talented musician and this world certainly needs more music and less political extremism.
Please address the issue at hand: Thomas Middle School and other middle school academic performance rather than launching into ad hominem attacks on me, CARES and its members. If you don’t, it means you can’t. Deal with the facts.
Monday’s Board meeting should be interesting since Lochburn Middle School will be making its presentation to the Board. Here are Lochburn stats: address them if you can.
Ranked 525 out of 539 middle schools statewide (2.6 percentile).
97.4% of state middle schools are academically superior.
Student achieving State standards in: ELA19.7%, math 10.6%; science 22.3%
Lochburn has languished at 3% or lower academically since 2017.
Want to bet you won’t hear this in the Lochburn briefing on Monday?
The new Board will have to deal with this academic catastrophe now on the their watch.
Dear Mr. Arbeeny,
Here is the issue at hand. The data that you cite from schooldigger.com may be providing misinformation as stated in an excerpt from an article about websites that rate schools:
“How Accurate are Sites that Rank Public Schools?
In a column titled “Data Are Good; More Data May Not Be Better,” published in Gothamschools.org on July 22, TC Professor Aaron Pallas takes a close look at schooldigger.com, a Web site that ranks public schools from best to worst based on a variety of data.
Pallas notes that there has been a proliferation of such Web sites in recent years and concludes that schooldigger.com and other such sites “can never adequately address the question that I think is of greatest interest to parents: How would my child fare in this school, as compared to another school? If this is, indeed, the question, then school comparison websites are doomed to provide poor and potentially misleading answers.”
I suggest that you also check out OSPI report card (I have cited their website in the article) which unfortunately is year to year only which does not allow trend development. In a recent attempt to develop trends using OSPI data I was directed by OSPI to a data page which when searched had over 1,000,000 lines in an Excel spreadsheet dealing with academic performance back to 2018 and a similar number for Student Growth Percentile (SGP) lines back to 2018. It literally was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
Thus you have to depend on other sites for trends. Schooldigger isn’t the only one out there. I’ve cross checked data among several sites. There may be some variation in numbers but the bottom line is the same: many/most of CPSD school’s academic performance is well below average and in many cases getting worse. Every one, other than CPSD, knows a failing school even if they can’t see the trees for the forest.
Your answer to ” How would my child fare in this school, as compared to another school?” is contained in the OSPI report card as the Student Growth Percentile (SGP). OSPI states that a SGP of 50 is the median score for all schools in ELA and math. Go take a look at the OSPI report card for all the schools and you’ll find that out of the 22 CPSD schools there were only a few examples of SGPs that met or barely exceeded the median in ELA and math. Couple this with low numbers of students meeting state standards and you have a “perfect storm” of students already behind, improving at a slower rate than peers. That means they are falling further and further behind. They are being left in the academic dust.
Mr. Arbeeny, you just had a school board candidate, who you endorsed and personally assisted/prepared, use your faulty data and rhetoric to claim we had “failing” schools. When questioned at a community forum in Tillicum, your candidate actually believed that our students have to take the state tests in 12th grade in order to earn a diploma. This is false! He was clueless and surprised that 10th grade is the last grade where math and ELA tests are given! You, on the other hand, have known this for years, yet you did not inform your own candidate?! This lack of transparency on your part is consistent with the “diploma mill” claim that you, David Anderson and Paul Wagemann have been intent on peddling for the last several years.
Why was this young candidate not adequately prepared with the facts? You bet I’m personally calling you out. You want this community to believe you’re some type of educational expert, but don’t even know how testing is used to inform instructional interventions after testing. You decided a 10th grade score is a “forever” score. You decided students either Pass or Fail based on one test! You’re not doing that to my student nor do I want any student subjected to your backwards thinking. A one-shot state test is not the only measurement of a student’s overall yearly achievement. However, you sent a school board candidate out into the public to repeat what he had been told about testing based on your convoluted interpretations of data. He deserved better, our citizens deserved better and I believe the majority of the community showed they are quite skeptical of claims made by those associated with your organization. Expect push-back when you purposely twist data to promote yourself, your organization and your political agenda.
I am curious why the educational experts with 40+ years of experience that you claim are members of LakewoodCARES are oddly silent and unknown to the public. Why are you talking for them? If you want to tell the public how our schools should be run, let’s know who your experts are. I’d like to know their teaching backgrounds. Why all the secrets?
I respectfully advise you to try volunteering in schools where you can actually apply your educational gifts instead of telling professionals how to do their business. Start an after school music class for students and share your considerable talents and music knowledge while connecting with our students. They would love this! You might start with Lochburn since you are concerned about them. Part of helping students to achieve is finding the hook that engages them in wanting to be in school.
Address the subject of the article: Thomas Middle School academic performance. If you don’t, it means you can’t. “…connecting with our students” is important however it will not compensate for failing at the system’s strategic level (Board, Superintendent, staff). Heroic effort is the price you pay for poor planning.
Indeed a failing 10th grade score is typically preceded by failing middle and elementary scores: that’s the reality. It is also evidenced by year after year failure in each of these failing schools: it’s called a “trend”! If only a small minority of students meet State standards it’s pretty much impossible for those behind to ever catch up in the last 2 years of school when they haven’t caught up in the previous 10 years of school.
These are the real problems CPSD faces and closing your eyes won’t make them go away nor will blaming a group for surfacing them.
So, you want people to address a bed of lies and biased, skewed data? You admitted privately the data doesn’t provide enough info to identify or address trends. Yet, here you are, publicly pushing data you know you didn’t have enough information to pursue. Why? What is your point other than an innate need to be right even when you’re wrong? What is your purpose? Better yet, what is your solution other than outdated policies that have proven to harm students and families more than they helped keep the districts safe across the nation, like the zero-tolerance policy you were recommending at one point? Did anyone else notice Arbeeny alone on his island of insufficient data? Where is his usual crew? Are they tired of being pawns in Arbeeny’s game? Perhaps trouble in alt-right paradise?