Submitted by John Arbeeny.
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 Beachwood Elementary School which was featured in a Suburban Times article on 30 September 2024:
This Lakewood CARES article is an update of the Lakewood CARES Suburban Times article of 22 January 2024 entitled “Beachwood Elementary School: Successful within a Failing CPSD”.
Beachwood is an example of what a public school can be and what CPSD should be. Unfortunately you’d never know just how good Beachwood is 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. No winners; no losers. Equal outcomes: That’s “equity” for you.
Beachwood is a top elementary school academically by any metric used. In 2017 Beachwood was a below-average school ranked academically at 38.3 percentile (%). By 2024 it was ranked at 90.1 %: 116th out of 1168 Washington State elementary schools. That is quite an accomplishment in just over 7 years.
https://www.schooldigger.com/go/WA/schools/0141000246/school.aspx
Compare Beachwood’s academic ranking since 2016 with that of CPSD (25% in 2024):
The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction’s (OSPI) statistics back up this academic ranking.
https://reportcard.ospi.k12.wa.us/ReportCard/ViewSchoolOrDistrict/102233
Beachwood 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”): 2023/2024:
ELA: 75.9%, Math: 76.9%, Science: 82.5%
This excellence crosses all ethnic and racial groups who score between 60% and 80% in these subject areas. This phenomenon was discussed in the Lakewood CARES Suburban Times article of 13 March 2023 entitled, “Minorities Do the Best in the Best Schools and Those Schools Are the Ones on JBLM”.
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 you lower standards everyone looks good. That’s “equity” for you.
Beachwood’s academic proficiency scores are among the very highest in the district, and so is its Student Growth Potential (SGP). SGP is professed to be the most important metric for teachers yet it recently disappeared from the OSPI report card front page where it can be found under the title “growth”. Here Beachwood excels again in 2023/2024: SGP ELA: 70%, SGP Math: 65.5%.
These SGP scores are well above the median of 50% and show that Beachwood students not only start out with higher proficiency but are accelerating their academic achievement from that position at a rate far greater than most other elementary schools. Growth, independent from proficiency, does not indicate academic success: it takes both to present an accurate assessment.
Beachwood follows the low disciplinary trend at many CPSD elementary schools. OSPI defines “discipline rate” as “What percent of students are excluded in response to a behavioral violation?” “Exclusion” means suspensions or expulsions. Beachwood’s disciplinary rate is under 0.78%, which provides a stress-free learning environment.
Beachwood’s attendance rate of students attending 90% or more school days is 79.3%. You can only learn if you attend school, and you will only want to attend school in a stable environment!
Beachwood is one of several academically superior JBLM elementary schools that feed Thomas Middle School. Unfortunately there has been a precipitous decline in student attendance, discipline, academic proficiency and growth once feeder elementary school students arrive at Thomas. The question then is what happened to these superior students who, in transition from elementary school to middle school, dropped from an academic ranking as high as 90.1% to an academic ranking of 19.3%? How does a Beachwood disciplinary rate of 0.78% figure into a Thomas Middle School disciplinary rate of 7.3%, nearly 10 times higher?
Beachwood started out with the best possibilities academically, but something happened along the way in transition to middle school. Removing those students from a learning-rich environment on JBLM resulted in a crash academically almost overnight in a low-learning environment outside JBLM. That should be reason enough for a full blown investigation into the success at Beachwood and JBLM and the institution of like measures throughout the district.
You can read up on Thomas Middle School’s academic situation at:
NOTE: All Lakewood CARES Suburban Times articles back to 2021 are archived at the URL below for easy search and access.
