Transparency Files – Page 2 – A Floor, But Not a Ceiling

The Transparency Files: Self-Evaluation

With the theme of this year being “Getting Our Mojo Back,” one thing that you can be sure of as the calendar turns to May and June, is that I will deliver you a series of “Transparency Files” blog posts! OJCS Parents will soon receive their link to our Annual Parent Survey, and so I will again begin with a self-evaluation and will continue with the sharing of results of that survey, the results from our Annual Faculty Survey (which is shared directly with them), and will conclude with a discussion of next year and an introduction of the 2023-2024 OJCS Faculty. [These posts will not follow week-by-week.]

We are in that “evaluation” time of year! As Head of School, I have the responsibility of performing an evaluation of staff and faculty each year. Fittingly, they have an opportunity to do the same of me. Our Annual Faculty Survey presents current teachers and staff with the opportunity to provide anonymous feedback of my performance as Head of School. Our Annual Parent Survey presents current parents with an opportunity to do the same (as part of a much larger survey of school satisfaction). Please know that the full unedited results of both are sent onto the OJCS Board of Trustees Head Support & Evaluation Committee as part of their data collection for the execution of my annual performance review.

You are welcome to review last year’s self-evaluation post before moving onto this year’s. Like last year’s, I am going to skip the cutting-and-pasting from my goal-setting document and simply present to you a few big ideas that come from my “principal’s” bucket, and not as much from my “head of school’s” bucket (i.e. fundraising, marketing, budgeting, etc.).

…thanks to a grant from Prizmah we partnered with PJ Library on a variety of events to grow the number of Jewish families in Ottawa who are familiar with our school! Highlights included a Library Storytime, lulav & etrog-shaking in our OJCS Sukkah, and two different “Havdalah in the Park” programs – one in Centrepointe and one in Alta Vista. We are looking forward to building on this relationship in the years to come!

…in order to fully mark the transition from COVID to…now…we thought it was important to revisit three “Critical Conversations” that were so helpful to our growth (in every sense of the word) during our first few years together. We, therefore, held three “Town Halls”: 1) Let’s Talk About the “J” in “OJCS”…Again: The JS Town Hall 2022; 2) Let’s Talk About French…Again. L’assemblée de Français 2022; and 3) Let’s Talk About the Future…Again: The “Sneak Peek” Town Hall 2023. Our hope is that we have successfully put all our families on an even playing field as to how we got from where we were to where we are…and provided clarity as to how we plan to get from where we are to where we are headed.

…we began our three-year journey to full CAIS Accreditation by focusing on getting organized and beginning to think through succession planning both on the lay (board) side and on the professional side. As we complete this journey, we seek to help parents in our community better understand how we fit into the private school landscape, as OJCS will – eventually – join Ashbury and Elmwood as the only CAIS Accredited schools in Ottawa.

…in addition to launching French-language PE this year, we tried to shine a brighter spotlight on all things French at OJCS with La célébration de la semaine de la Francophonie 2023, which culminated in a wonderful Francofête attended by parents. We look forward to building on both as we continue to focus attention on French outcomes for OJCS graduates.

…we piloted a Middle School Information Night for Grade 5 Parents and will follow up in June with a Taste of Middle School for Grade 5 Students. We want to do a better and better job celebrating the value proposition for Middle School at OJCS. Beginning the conversation earlier can only help.

…with the help of a generous grant by the Jewish Federation of Ottawa‘s Fund for Innovative Capacity Building, OJCS Hebrew Faculty worked with Hebrew at the Center over the balance of this school year on a curriculum mapping consultancy. Once complete (in another 1-2 years), we will have a deliverable for both teachers and parents that fully describe our benchmarks and standards for all Jewish Studies topics across all grades.

What did not get done or what still needs work?

A lot!

First order of business will be moving forward on our amazing $1.5 million reimagination (now $2 million) of classrooms at OJCS thanks to an anonymous gift. We have been working with an architect firm – Figurr – and look forward to launching this summer. [Stay tuned for all of what that will and won’t mean for the start of school.] The future of education in Ottawa really will be built right here at OJCS!

Second order of business will be continuing to reconnect with our families and our community. We aspire to be more than a school, but people’s lives are so busy! What can we do differently next year? What should we do differently next year? What should a PTA be and look like? What kinds of friend-raising activities could we or should we be facilitating or encouraging for OJCS parents? What kinds of Jewish experiences could we be promoting or providing for OJCS families?

Third order of business, somewhat related to this year’s theme, is “teachers teaching”. After years of worthwhile complications and interruptions through task forces, consultancies and quasi-administrative portfolios, next year will be about streamlining, simplifying, quieting and calming. We have reached a new stage of our journey as a school and what is required now is refocusing on what our most sacred tasks are – teachers teaching and students learning.

Those are just highlights.

If you have already contributed feedback through our surveys, thank you. [Remember the deadline for your feedback to be included in reporting is May 15th.] Your (additional and/or direct) feedback – whether shared publicly, privately through email or social media, or shared through conversation – is greatly appreciated. As I tell our teachers, I look forward to getting better at my job each year and I am thankful for the feedback I receive that allows me to try.

Let’s Talk About the Future…Again: The “Sneak Peek” Town Hall 2023

As discussed, connected to our larger theme this year of “Getting Our Mojo Back”, last night we held the third of our three critical conversations this year, that both hearkened back to give everyone equal footing and dreamed forward to give everyone an equal stake. Last night’s “town hall” was dedicated to the school’s learning journey over the last few years and to share a “sneak peek” about where our journey is headed into our next chapter. Thank you to the many parents who joined us!

What I’d like to do here, is provide a kind of annotated guide to the slides that were presented – layering in a bit of my own commentary. Parent voice is critical to our ability to dream big dreams, since you, our parents, are our most important stakeholder community and partner. Please add your voice to the conversation in whichever way is comfortable for you – comment on this blog, shoot me a private email, or make an appointment to come in.

This takes the village.

The initial set of slides were intended to level-set; to ensure that whenever a family joined their journey to the school’s, that we share a common view and a common language about where we have been and where we are headed. One of our “North Stars” is about “owning our learning”. Another way of framing that is to say that we “own our own stories” – and the degree to which parents are able to share in our larger narrative is a sign of health.

Let’s start with our “what”…

It is always nice to be reminded of our “why”…

And along with our “what” and our “why”…comes our “how”…

And nice reminder about our “who”…

And a important reminder of “why now”…

What about our “where” you may ask? We’ll get there…

We then pivoted to highlight the big takeaways from our two prior “Critical Conversations”. You can revisit the “Let’s Talk About the ‘J’ in OJCS…Again” Town Hall here; you can visit the “Let’s Talk About French…Again. L’assemblée de Français 2022” here.

Moving forward, we leaned into two big-ticket items that are already generating excitement in their “soft launches” with so much more to come…

Up first…The OJCS Makerspace!

And this is just the beginning…

Next up? “Mitzvah Trips”!

What other big dreams to we have?

Oh…and that “where” we mentioned earlier? Here are the first glimpses of what will be coming to OJCS as soon as next school year:

Stay tuned for a full set of drawings and renderings…and timetable.

And, finally, again, a reminder of what this is all about…

Need to be even more excited about the future of OJCS as enrollment for 2023-2024 has opened up? (And “thank you” to all the families who have already applied/enrolled!) We have two important events on the calendar:

SK Information Night, February 16th @ 7:00 PM
Middle School Information Night, March 2nd @ 7:00 PM

For more information about either, or to simply schedule a tour, please contact our Admissions Director, Jenn Greenberg, at [email protected].

The Transparency Files: CAT4 Results Part 3 (of 3)

Welcome to “Part III” of our analysis of this year’s CAT4 results!

In Part I, we provided a lot of background context and shared out the simple results of how we did this year. In Part II, we began sharing comparative data, focusing on snapshots of the same cohort (the same group of children) from 2019 to 2021 (with bonus data from 2018’s Grade 3). Remember, based on which grades have taken the CAT4 when, we were only able to compare at the cohort level from 2019’s Grades 3-5 to 2021’s Grades 5-7 to 2022’s Grades 6-8. [Remember, that we did not take them at all in 2020 due to COVID.] In the future, that part of the analysis will only grow more robust and meaningful. We also provided targeted analysis based on cohort data.

Here, in Part III, we will finish sharing comparative data, this time focusing on snapshots of the same grade (different groups of children). We are able, now, to only provide data on Grades 5-8 (from 2019, 2021, & 2022, with bonus data from 2018’s Grade 6), but in future years we’ll be able to expand this analysis downwards.

Here is a little analysis that applies to all four snapshots:

Remember that any score that is two grades above ending in “.9” represents the max score, like getting a “6.9” for Grade 5.
We are no longer comparing the same children over time, as when it comes to analyzing a cohort, therefore we aren’t looking for the same kinds of trajectories or patterns in the data. You could make a case – and I might below – that this part of the data analysis isn’t as particularly meaningful, but we go into it open to the idea that there may be patterns or outliers that jump out and warrant a thoughtful response.
As we have mentioned, the jump between 2019 and 2021 might have been the place one would have expected to see a “COVID Gap” (but we largely did NOT) and between 2021 and 2022 one might expect to see a “COVID Catch-Up”.

Here are the grade snapshots:

What do these grade snapshots reveal?

Again, keeping in mind that we are not tracing the trajectory of the same students, outliers like “Spelling” and “Computation & Estimation” for Grade 7 in 2021 help us understand that whatever is happening there is more a function of the cohort than the grade, which means that the remedy or intervention, if needed, has less to do with the curriculum or the program in Grade 7 and more to do with better meeting the needs of that that particular cohort of children. [And you can see how that played out and with what results by cross-checking with the cohort data in Part II.] To be clear we aren’t suggesting that the only explanation for their outlier status is about them that it is the children’s fault! The deeper dive into the data helps clarify that this is not a “Grade 7” issue, it doesn’t absolve us from better understanding or applying a remedy.
You can see a little of the reverse by looking at “Computation & Estimation” in Grade 6. Now, in this case we are only dealing with being at grade-level or above, but you can see that Grade 2021’s relatively higher score (7.7) is an outlier. If the goal was to have each Grade 6 score nearly a grade-and-a-half above – which is certainly doesn’t have to be – you would look at the data and say this is a Grade 6 issue and we’d be looking at how students come out of Grade 5 and what we do in the beginning of Grade 6. Again, this is not about intervening to address a deficit, but I use it to point out how we can use the data to better understand outliers and patterns.
To the degree that this data set is meaningful, the trajectory that feels the most achievable considering we are dealing with different children is what you see in Grade 5 “Computation & Estimation” – small increases each year based on having identified an issue an applying an intervention.
The bottom line is essentially the same as having viewed it through the cohort lens: almost each grade in almost every year in almost each area is scoring significantly above its grade-level equivalencies.

Current Parents: CAT4 reports will be coming home this week. Any parent for whom we believe a contextual phone call is a value add has, or will, be contacted by a teacher.

The bottom line is that our graduates – year after year – successfully place into the high school programs of their choice. Each one had a different ceiling – they are all different – but working with them, their families and their teachers, we successfully transitioned them all to the schools (private and public) and programs (IB, Gifted, French Immersion, Arts, etc.) that they qualified for.

And now again this year, with all the qualifications and caveats, and still fresh out of the most challenging set of educational circumstances any generation of students and teachers have faced, our CAT4 scores continue to demonstrate excellence. Excellence within the grades and between them.

Not a bad place to be as we open the 2023-2024 enrollment season…

If you want to see how all the dots connect from our first Critical Conversation (Jewish Studies), our second Critical Conversation (French), our CAT4 results, and so much more…please be sure to join us for our third and final Critical Conversation, “The ‘Future’ of OJCS” on Thursday, February 9th at 7:00 PM.

The Transparency Files: CAT4 Results Part 2 (of 3)

Welcome to “Part II” of our analysis of this year’s CAT4 results!

In last week’s post, we provided a lot of background context and shared out the simple results of how we did this year. Here, in our second post, we are now able to begin sharing comparative data, focusing on snapshots of the same cohort (the same group of children) from 2019 to 2021 (with bonus data from 2018’s Grade 3). In other words, for now based on which grades have taken the CAT4 when, we can only compare at the cohort level from 2019’s Grades 3-5 to 2021’s Grades 5-7 to 2022’s Grades 6-8. [Remember, that we did not take them at all in 2020 due to COVID.] In the future, this part of the analysis will only grow more robust and meaningful.

Here is a little analysis that will apply to all three snapshots:

Remember that any score that is two grades above ending in “.9” represents the max score, like getting a “6.9” for Grade 5.
Bear in mind, that the metric we are normally looking at when it comes to comparing a cohort over time is whether or not we see at least one full year’s growth (on average) each year – here we are factoring an expected two full year’s growth between 2019 and 2021. As we discussed last year, that might have been the place one would have expected to see a “COVID Gap” (but we largely did NOT) and between 2021 and 2022 one might expect to see a “COVID Catch-Up”.

Here are the cohort snapshots:

What does this snapshot of current Grade 6s reveal?

They consistently function a full grade if not not more above the expected grade level.
That even with COVID we consistently see at least a year’s worth of growth each year across almost all the topics.
Technically, there is only six month’s worth of growth “Mathematics” (6.9 to 7.5) from 2021 to 2022, but that is already significantly above grade level.
The one domain, Computation & Estimation, where they are barely below grade level (6.0), we can now properly contextualize by noting that they grew from 4.4 in 2021 to 6.0 in 2022 – more than a year’s worth of growth in a year (the year we would expect a bit of “COVID Catch-Up”. This means, that they should be more than on track to match all the rest of their scores being significantly above grade level when they take the text in 2023.

All in all…excellent news and trajectory for our current Grade 6s.

What does this snapshot of current Grade 7s reveal?

Not much! This cohort has maxed out their scores in almost every domain in almost each year! And in the few places they did not, they were still above grade level – like “Spelling” (4.9) and “Computation & Estimation” (5.5) in 2019 – and grew at least a full grade level each year so that by now, in Grade 7, it is max scores all across the board! That is pretty awesome to see.

What does this snapshot of current Grade 8s reveal?

This class had a bit of stranger trajectory, but essentially ends where we would like. “Spelling” took a strange path, beginning way above grade level, plateauing with a dip where we should have seen two years worth of growth, and now fully rebounding to grade level. “Computation” had a more normal curve, but went from being consistently a year below grade level before completely catching up and now being well above.

To sum up this post, we have a lot to be proud of in the standardized test scores of these particular cohorts over time. The two areas (Spelling and Computation & Estimation) that were worthy of prioritization the last couple of years (this year’s Grades 6 & 8) were indeed prioritized. We began providing professional growth opportunities for language arts teachers in our school on Structured Word Inquiry as part of larger conversation about the “Science of Reading”. [Please check out our Director of Special Needs, Sharon Reichstein’s recent post on this issue, which I’ll also have more to say about in Part III.] With regard to Computation & Estimation, we discussed it during last year’s November PD Day which focused on “Data-Driven Decision Making” and it has continued to be a point of emphasis. The results indicate that these efforts have borne fruit.

The Math and Language Arts Teachers in Grades 3-8 have now begun meeting to go through CAT4 results in greater detail, with an eye towards what kinds of interventions are needed now – in this year – to fill any gaps (both for individual students and for cohorts); and how might we adapt our long-term planning to ensure we are best meeting needs.

Stay tuned next week for the concluding “Part III” when we will look at the same grade (different students) over time, see what additional wisdom is to be gleaned from that slice of analysis, and conclude this series of posts with some final summarizing thoughts.

The Transparency Files: CAT4 Results Part 1 (of 3)

As committed to “transparency” as I am, I find myself growing more and more ambivalent each year about how to best facilitate an appropriate conversation about why our school engages in standardized testing (which for us, like many independent schools in Canada, is the CAT4), what the results mean (and what they don’t mean), how it impacts the way in which we think about “curriculum” and, ultimately, what the connection is between a student’s individual results and our school’s personalized learning plan for that student. It is not news that education is a field in which pendulums tend to wildly swing back and forth as new research is brought to light. We are always living in that moment and it has always been my preference to aim towards pragmatism. Everything new isn’t always better and, yet, sometimes it is. Sometimes you know right away and sometimes it takes years.

I have already taken a blog post that I used to push out in one giant sea of words, and over time broke it into two ,and now three parts, because even I don’t want to read a 3,000 word post. But, truthfully, it still doesn’t seem enough. I continue to worry that I have not done a thorough enough job providing background, research and context to justify a public-facing sharing of standardized test scores. Probably because I haven’t. [And that’s without factoring in all the COVID gaps that come along with it.]

And yet.

With the forthcoming launch of Annual Grades 9 & 12 Alumni Surveys and the opening of the admissions season for the 2023-2024 school year, it feels fair and appropriate to be as transparent as we can about how well we are (or aren’t) succeeding academically against an external set of benchmarks, even as we are still just freshly coming out facing extraordinary circumstances. That’s what “transparency” as a value and a verb looks like. We commit to sharing the data and our analysis regardless of outcome. We also do it because we know that for the overwhelming majority of our parents, excellence in secular academics is a non-negotiable, and that in a competitive marketplace with both well-regarded public schools and secular private schools, our parents deserve to see the school’s value proposition validated beyond anecdotes.

Now for the annual litany of caveats and preemptive statements…

We have not yet shared out individual reports to our parents. First our teachers have to have a chance to review the data to identify which test results fully resemble their children well enough to simply pass on, and which results require contextualization in private conversation. Those contextualizing conversations will take place in the next few weeks and, thereafter, we should be able to return all results.

There are a few things worth pointing out:

Because of COVID, this is now only our fourth year taking this assessment at this time of year. We were in the process of expanding the range from Grades 3-8 in 2019, but we paused in 2020 and restricted last year’s testing to Grades 5-8. This means that we can only compare at the grade level from 2019’s Grades 5-8 to 2021’s Grades 5-8 to 2022’s Grades 5-8.
And we can only compare at the cohort level from 2019’s Grades 3-5 to 2021’s Grades 5-7 to 2022’s Grades 6-8.
This is the first year we have tested Grades 3 & 4 on this exam at this time of year.
From this point further, assuming we continue to test in (at least) Grades 3-8 annually, we will soon have tracking data across all grades which will allow us to see if…
- The same grade scores as well or better each year.
- The same cohort grows at least a year’s worth of growth.

The last issue is in the proper understanding of what a “grade equivalent score” really is.

Grade-equivalent scores attempt to show at what grade level and month your child is functioning. However, grade-equivalent scores are not able to show this. Let me use an example to illustrate this. In reading comprehension, your son in Grade 5 scored a 7.3 grade equivalent on his Grade 5 test. The 7 represents the grade level while the 3 represents the month. 7.3 would represent the seventh grade, third month, which is December. The reason it is the third month is because September is zero, October is one, etc. It is not true though that your son is functioning at the seventh grade level since he was never tested on seventh grade material. He was only tested on fifth grade material. He performed like a seventh grader on fifth grade material. That’s why the grade-equivalent scores should not be used to decide at what grade level a student is functioning.

Let me finish this section by being very clear: We do not believe that standardized test scores represent the only, nor surely the best, evidence for academic success. Our goal continues to be providing each student with a “floor, but no ceiling” representing each student’s maximum success. Our best outcome is still producing students who become lifelong learners.

But I also don’t want to undersell the objective evidence that shows that the work we are doing here does in fact lead to tangible success. That’s the headline, but let’s look more closely at the story. (You may wish to zoom in a bit on whatever device you are reading this on…)

A few tips on how to read this:

We take this exam in the “.2” of each grade-level year. That means that “at grade level” [again, please refer above to a more precise definition of “grade equivalent scores”] for any grade we are looking at would be 5.2, 6.2, 7.2, etc. For example, if you are looking at Grade 6, anything below 6.2 would constitute “below grade level” and anything above 6.2 would constitute “above grade level.”
The maximum score for any grade is “.9” of the next year’s grade. If, for example, you are looking at Grade 8 and see a score of 9.9, on our forms it actually reads “9.9+” – the maximum score that can be recorded.
Because of when we take this test – approximately two months into the school year – it is reasonable to assume a significant responsibility for results is attributable to the prior year’s teachers and experiences. But, of course, it is very hard to tease it out exactly, of course.

What are the key takeaways from these snapshots of the entire school?

Looking at six different grades through six different dimensions there are only five instances out of thirty-six of scoring below grade-level: Grade 3 (Vocabulary 2.2, Writing Conventions 2.5, and Spelling 2.6), Grade 5 (Computation Estimation 4.6), and Grade 6 (Computation Estimation barely falling short at 6.0).
I’m not quite sure what to make of Grade 3’s Language Arts scores altogether. Reading and Writing has been the most notable lagging skill for the Grade 3 cohort since their entry into Grade 2. This is in part due to disruptions to their learning through their foundation-building years in Kindergarten and Grade 1. In Grade 2, this cohort’s remediation was heavily focused on closing the gaps in reading and comprehension abilities, as developmentally this is what comes first. The remediation focus has shifted to writing at the start of Grade 3, as this is a lagging skill that was already identified prior to the CAT-4 testing. Supports and interventions have already been put in place to address this lagging skill and we have seen academic growth in these areas. To put it more simply: These are our youngest students whose early learning was the most disrupted by COVID and they have never taken a standardized test before in their lives. It will become a baseline that I imagine us jumping over quickly in the years to come – I’m inclined to toss them out as an anomaly.
Importantly, tracing the trajectory from our 2019 results to our 2021 results to 2022’s, we can now more conclusively state that Spelling and Computation & Estimation are no longer globally lower as a school relative to the other dimensions. I will have more to say about why we believe this to be true in Parts II & III.

Stay tuned next week when we begin to dive into the comparative data. “Part II” will look at the same cohort over time. “Part III” will look at the same grade (the same group of students) over time and conclude this series of posts with some additional summarizing thoughts.

The Transparency Files: The 2022-2023 Faculty

Happy Thursday!

Things don’t usually time out quite in this way, but here we are on literally the last day of school – for teachers – and before we head into Canada Day Weekend and the true start of summer, it is my sincere joy and pleasure to be able to share out a complete picture of the amazing human beings who will be teaching our children and leading our school into the 2022-2023 school year at the Ottawa Jewish Community School.

The quickest of words before I unveil the list…

…the first is simply to share that we are operating under the belief that next year will truly be a return to normal. Or at least normal enough that it ought not impact how we divide up classes or how we program our days and year. Of course, we will continue to maintain a Health Advisory Committee, and much closer to the start of the school year, will provide parents with what guidelines and suggestions we believe are appropriate for the start of next school year. But as we put together our staffing picture, our classroom assignments and our calendar, we are assuming near-normal functioning.

…the second is to share with you the overarching idea that has animated our two days of what we call “Pre-Pre-Planning” – these two PD days that essentially mark the beginning of the 2022-2023 school year because they focus our teachers on how to set themselves up for a successful summer in service of a successful start to school. We are focusing our energy on “Getting Our Mojo Back” or, perhaps, the “Great Unpause” – it is time for our school to reclaim the exciting and innovative trajectory we were on pre-COVID. We were smack in the middle of some very important and impactful projects, initiatives and programs and we are all-too ready to get back on track. You may get a hint of it when looking at some of the job descriptions below; you will get a full (re)introduction to it as we gear up for next year.

…the third is to please start paying attention to the updated calendar. A return to normal means a return to events like our PTA-sponsored “Back to School BBQ” and “Meet & Greets” for JK and SK, so please be sure to update your calendars so you are ready to join us as we look to (re)build our community, to truly function again as an OJCS Family.

…the fourth is a gentle reminder that the assignments below are tentative as they always are. Things sometimes can and do change (especially as our JK and SK classes continue to grow!), although we believe this should be much less of a factor this summer than the prior two, but sometimes we do have to make adjustments. If an update is required, of course, it will be sent either directly to the impacted grades or in a blog post.

OK, I think I have given a lengthy enough preamble. Let’s get excited about this gifted and loving group of teachers and administrators, who will partner with our parents in the sacred work of educating our children. I know I am!

The 2022-2023 OJCS Faculty & Staff

Lower School General Studies Faculty

Junior Kindergarten: Susan Wollock, Jamie Ebbs (French) & Mushki Kurtz (EA)
Kindergarten: Andréa Black, Susan Wollock (French) & Dawn Schneider (EA)
Grade One: Julie Bennett/Karissa Zuorro & Efi Mouchou (French) [TWO Classes]
Grade Two: Ann-Lynn Rapoport & Efi Mouchou (French) [TWO Classes]
Grade Three: Lianna Krantzberg & Aaron Polowin (French)
Grade Four: Faye Mellenthin, Chelsea Cleveland (Math), Dr. Sylvie Raymond (Core) & Aaron Polowin (Extended) [TWO Classes]
Grade Five: Abby Whitteker, Karissa Zuorro (Core) & Dr. Sylvie Raymond (Extended) [TWO Classes]

Lower School Jewish Studies Faculty

Kitah JK: Susan Wollock
Kitah Gan: Andréa Black
Kitah Alef: Ada Aizenberg/Saar Baram [TWO Classes]
Kitah Bet: Corrine Baray/Sigal Baray [TWO Classes]
Kitah Gimmel: Sigal Baray
Kitah Dalet: Dana Doron [TWO Classes]
Kitah Hay: Marina Riklin/Liat Levy [TWO Classes]

Middle School Faculty

Science: Josh Ray
Mathematics: Chelsea Cleveland (Grades 6 & 7) & Josh Ray (Grade 8)
Language Arts: Language Arts Teacher
Social Studies: Michael Washerstein
Extended French: Wanda Canaan
Core French: Aaron Polowin (Grade 6) & Dr. Sylvie Raymond (Grades 7 & 8)
Hebrew: Marina Riklin (Hebrew Alef), Liat Levy (Hebrew Bet for Grade 6) & Ruthie Lebovich (Hebrew Bet for 7 & 8)
Jewish Studies: Mike Washerstein
Rabbinics: Corinne Baray

Specialists

Art & Drama: Jamie Ebbs
French Language PE: Stéphane Cinanni (Grades 3-8), Aaron Polowin (Grades 1 & 2) & Karissa Zuorro (Grades JK-1)
Library: Brigitte Ruel

Leads

Makerspace: Josh Ray
Mitzvah Trips: Michael Washerstein
Student Life: Lianna Krantzberg
Blogging & Global Connectedness: Julie Bennett
Jewish Studies Curriculum: Ada Aizenberg
Jewish Studies Coaching: Ruthie Lebovich

Department of Special Education

Keren Gordon, Vice Principal
Sharon Reichstein, Director of Special Education
Ashley Beswick, Resource Teacher & Behavior Support Coordinator
Resource Teacher
Chelsea Cleveland, Math Resource

Administration

Josh Max – Director of Technology
Ellie Kamil – Executive Assistant to the Head of School
Staci Zemlak-Kenter – Director of Development
Emily Jiang – Chief Accountant
Jennifer Greenberg – Director of Recruitment
Keren Gordon – Vice Principal
Dr. Jon Mitzmacher – Head of School

You will see some new names and some new categories…

Let me start my saying that unlike previous years where the generic names, like “Middle School Language Arts Teacher” means that we have not yet hired someone, I am over-the-moon thrilled to say that we are actually 100% staffed for next year! However, until contracts have been technically signed and current employers informed, we will have to wait a titch before formally introducing those last couple of employees. But we will as soon as we can, and, we can’t wait for you to be as impressed by them as we are.

You will see a new category “Leads”. This category, for now, replaces an older category of quasi-administrators that we had been calling “Coordinators”. There are some internally meaningful, union-related differences between the two titles, but what is important to know is that these “Leads” all represent opportunities for OJCS teachers to build their leadership capacity by taking on quasi-administrative responsibility for high-value new or continuing programs. We have written extensively about the OJCS Makerspace and OJCS Mitzvah Trips, and, therefore, it should come as no surprise that we are making them priorities heading into next school year. “Student Life” and “Blogging” are in some ways carryovers from portfolios held by two teachers currently on maternity leave, but also opportunities for new teachers to both grow their leadership and help our school grow in these critical areas as well.

The last thing to mention as a segue to providing brief bios on new staff is that we have made a tactical decision to move away – at least for now – from pursuing a “Head of Jewish Studies” who has all the education, skills and experiences we have been searching for, but have failed to find. It isn’t that we couldn’t or won’t keep looking for that just-right person, but there are too many important pieces of work that need to be done in our Jewish Studies Department to keep waiting for that savior to arrive. We are very blessed that we have been able to essentially divide the position into five parts and that each part has been assigned to someone capable, talented, passionate and ready to go. In a nutshell…

…I will continue to hold onto the supervision and evaluation of Jewish Studies Faculty. It is the one part of the job that I have successfully managed during these last few years, and I believe it is both appropriate and helpful for me to keep that in my portfolio for the future.

…our JS Faculty have been in need of great mentoring and coaching and there can be no better person qualified to do that, then our own Ruthie Lebovich, master teacher with decades of experience.

…”Jewish Student Life” and “Student Life” don’t need to be kept separate in a Jewish Day School, and with Lianna Krantzberg moving into this role, between her experiences here and her administrative role at CBB-Ottawa, this merger will be both seamless and powerful.

…we have been waiting to move forward with some big-picture benchmarks and standards decisions in Jewish Studies. What exactly do we expect students at OJCS to learn by the end of Grade 8? What experiences do we want for them? What is the best curriculum to support those goals? We are past due finalizing what we expect each child, in each grade, in each part of our Jewish Studies program to learn, to know, to know how, to experience, etc., and Ada Aizenberg will be just the person to lead our team in this project.

…and we have needed a real live human being to take back the teaching of text and rabbinics in our school, and so let me now segue into the introductions…

Please welcome Corinne Baray into a permanent position at OJCS! Ms. Baray is well known to our school community as a very respected guest teacher. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University. She is a graduate of OJCS and the former Yitzhak Rabin High School. While her research interests surround the area of criminal law, Corinne has a particular passion for education and pedagogy. Corinne is also an Instructor and Course Developer at Carleton University, and has taught at all academic levels, including elementary, high school, and college – as well as ESL education for elementary students in Rishon Letzion, Israel. She has vast experience teaching in Jewish schools, has a breadth and depth of Torah and text skills, and will be a welcome addition to our Jewish Studies Faculty.

Jamie Ebbs is thrilled to join our Faculty with a diverse portfolio. He will be creating and leading our Arts and Drama programs, as well as teaching Junior Kindergarten French and Physical Education in French. Jamie graduated from the University of Ottawa, Bachelor of Education’s Imagination, Creativity and Innovation Cohort. He also has a Master Degree in Cultural Studies, as well as an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Theatre. We’ve scooped him up so he can sprinkle this love of the arts into all we do.

Efi Mouchou is relocating to Ottawa this summer from Greece with her beautiful family and looks so forward to meeting our school community. Madame Efi is a certified teacher who completed her studies at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. She has taught French to all grade-levels in locations around the world over the last 20 years, however most often in International British school settings. She is so excited to be teaching our Grade 1 & 2 French classes next year and has so much to offer our students with already developed programs from her own repertoire, as well as from close conversations with our primary French faculty. Madame Efi is so full of life and is passionate about making French language learning fun and we look forward to welcoming her to OJCS.

Please note that I intend to take a pause from weekly blogging as we head into summer. Of course, should the spirit move me, or an issue arises that warrants it, I will blog intermittently, until resuming my weekly routine a week or so before our teachers return for Pre-Planning Week 2022.

Happy summer!

The Transparency Files: Annual Parent Survey

Looking out my office window at the sunny skies [when I first wrote this on Tuesday afternoon!], is both a reminder of the first stirrings of normalcy and what we hope next year and beyond will bring… as atypical as this third year of COVID has been, we do find comfort in familiar habits and experiences. And so if it is May, it must be time to share the results of this year’s Annual Parent Survey. If you would like to see a full comparison with last year, you can reread those results or have them open so you can toggle back and forth. In this post, I will try to capture the highlights and identify what trends seem worth paying attention to.

The first thing to name, which does not come as a tremendous surprise considering the times we are living through, is that we continue to have a less-than representation. In fact, it seems that the more we grow, the percentage of students represented by the survey decreases. Our enrollment has grown each year that I have been here, but our survey has gone from covering 81 students to 84 students to 54 students to 58 students to 52 students. That means that this year’s survey represents barely more than a quarter of our student population! As the survey is per student, not per family, it runs the risk of being even less representative than that. (In the service of anonymity, we have no way of knowing how many families the survey actually represents.) Our goal of 50% seems more and more unrealistic each year. [If you have feedback on what might incentivize greater participation, please drop it in the comments or email it to us directly.]

I simply no longer know if or how to draw meaningful conclusions about participation rates. Whereas it is common wisdom that folks with concerns are usually more likely to fill out these surveys, there is no common wisdom when it comes to pandemic times. So for what we hope is one final year, instead of worrying about the motivations for why families did or didn’t fill out surveys, let’s celebrate the parents who did participate and try to make meaning of what they are telling us.

For the second consecutive year, we have more spread than normal. It is more typical to have a big cluster in the youngest grades with diminishing returns as you get older. Again this year, we have a healthy distribution across most of our grades.

Without knowing how representative this quarter of students is, this data for sure lines up with what is true – that we have, again, had a fast and successful re-registration. The percentage who replied “yes” is up and the “noes” are always complicated to unpack because we have no way of knowing who of the “noes” represent graduations or relocations, as opposed to choosing to attrit prior to Grade 8). What continues to be true is that the overwhelming majority of families – regardless of their feedback – stay with us year-after-year. This continues to say a lot about them and a lot about us.

Let’s look at the BIG PICTURE:

The first chart gives you the weighted average satisfaction score (out of 10); the second chart gives you the breakdown by category. I will remind you that for this and all categories, I look at the range between 7-9 as the healthy band, obviously wanting scores to be closer to 9 than to 7, and looking for scores to go up each year. In terms of “overall satisfaction”, we have now gone from 7.13 to 7.20 to 8.17 to 7.91 to 8.0. Although it is just a tick up from last year, the difference is statistically insignificant. This is just the second time that no families graded the school a 1, 2 or 3. Of course, we always want to see numbers continue to go up, but based on how we survey it is hard to get much higher.

This continues to be a good news story, but let’s dig deeper…

The topline number – probably the most important – like our overall satisfaction is slightly up 7.91 to 7.93 and a very positive outcome.
I am very pleased to see that every single category is up from last year’s all-time highs and that each score is well within the healthy range!
I am thrilled to see that relationships with faculty again comes in with the highest score (8.65) in this block, especially when you factor in all the challenges the of pandemic have created. Kudos to our teachers!
Our lowest score (again) is again in “Homework” but it does continues to climb from 6.56 to 6.91 to 7.0 to 7.31. Progress has been steady, and we are seeing steady improvement in the full implementation of our new Homework Philosophy.
I am thrilled to see such a high score (8.41) for “creative and critical thinking skills”…that is very much #TheOJCSWay.

After having seen steady growth on the topline number, which again is so critical to our school, it is a bit disappointing to see a drop. We have gone from 6.61 to 6.97 to 7.58 to 7.15. It remains well within the healthy range, but we will be looking to get back on the upward track next year.
The metrics for Spec Ed are a bit of mixed bag with the communication score holding steady, but the satisfaction score for those who have IEPs dipping just a bit. The numbers remain strong and of all the things to suffer during the pandemic, it is not surprising to see it impact our most vulnerable students. Kudos to Sharon Reichstein, our Director of Special Needs Education, and her new team for all their work this year!

Thrilled to see that our topline number continues to remain (essentially) at 8!
Very happy to see that every metric in General Studies is well into the healthy band and each one is essentially unchanged.
- Math: 7.09 to 7.60 to 7.67 to 7.15.
- Science: 7.09 to 7.72 to 7.61 to 8.37.
- Social Studies: 7.41 to 7.96 to 7.95 to 7.86.
- Reading: 6.93 to 8.0 to 7.85 to 8.29.
- Writing: 6.51 to 7.07 t0 7.41 to 7.95
The biggest movement this year, which I am thrilled to see is “Science”, where we have invested precious bandwidth in Hackathons and Innovation Day and reopening the OJCS Makerspace, and in “Reading” where we have, not coincidentally, a number of teachers focusing on their professional growth. This is a clear example over time where parent voice, aligned with teacher and student voice, leads to meaningful action. (Fill out those surveys y’all! We really do pay attention.)
I am also very pleased to see “Writing”, like “Reading” continuing on a strong upward trajectory over the last four years.

I am pleased to report that despite another year of COVID functioning and the continued integration, that the quarter of students represented in this survey are reporting steady numbers for French outcomes.
We would like to believe that the result of our TACLEF consultancy is continuing to pay dividends and that our recent announcement of expanding our French program to incorporate French-language physical education will help these numbers continue to tick up in the years ahead. Bon travail to the French Department!

We are again thrilled to see all our Jewish Studies metrics continue to hold strong for another year. We are especially pleased to see the OVERALL metric essentially hold steady from 7.29 to 8.08 to 7.91 to 7.90. Considering, that we again went forward without filling the “Dean of Judaics” position and all the additional COVID-related challenges, this is especially encouraging. Kol ha’kavod to the Jewish Studies Department!
I am taking the slight dip in “Tefillah” as a personal challenge! It is my favourite subject to teach (students) and to coach (teachers) and I am going to make it my mission to push prayer past 7.0.
I am also going to – assuming a return to normal – encourage our community’s rabbis to resume a greater role in Jewish life at OJCS.

Considering the circumstances, it is both surprising and positive that with all the protocols that were in place that we’d see growth in both Art and PE – both of which have reentered the healthy band. We know that even with a rigorous, trilingual curriculum, that we need to continue to offer the kinds of high-quality PE/Drama/Art experiences that make a well-rounded education. We said last year to “look for these numbers to go back up next year”. Mission accomplished!
It is worth noting that even though none of our extracurriculars, athletics, hot lunch, etc., programming has reached pre-COVID numbers (understandably) they are all up from last year…with lots of room to grow.

From this year’s experimental section, we yield these two data points (and two sets of meaningful commentary). Compared to last year, there is a larger cluster in “very satisfied” and “extremely important” – which is likely not a coincidence. As we cannot predict the future, even with wholehearted hope of a return to year-round, in-person learning next year, our ability to navigate situations like these last few years with minimal disruption and maximal academic progress – not to mention the continuance of meaningful Jewish experiences – will likely continue to be powerful value-adds for OJCS in the years ahead.

These are mostly wonderful scores, all just about the same and well into the healthy ranges. We know that we have Ellie to thank for a lot of those high scores!
I am sadly saying again this year, that, “[a]fter having to take a COVID pause, I will be interested to see what the impact of ‘Student-Led Conferences’ will be on the ‘parent-teacher conferences’ metric once finally launched.

I have already shared my thoughts on my own job performance in my prior “Transparency Files” post. I will simply state here my pleasure in seeing my numbers holding strong, with the weakest one – providing learning opportunities for parents and caregivers with some health post-COVID room to grow.
The one metric that I am very pleased to see holding strong is the last one, which essentially serves as a proxy for school-wide behavior management. Three years ago we scored a 6.69 and I stated that, “we are working on launching a new, school-wide behavior management system next year based on the “7 Habits” and anchored in our “North Stars”. I will be surprised if this score doesn’t go up next year.” Well, two years ago it came in at 7.65, last year it climbed up to 8.19, and it remains high at 7.85 this year.

Last data point:

Remember this question was scaled 1-5. Our score remains consistent from 4.44 to 4.34 to 4.34 (again). I have said that I truthfully don’t know how much more there reasonably is to grow here, but we’ll keep doing our best to find out!

So there you have it for 2021-2022!

Thanks to all the parents who took the time and care to fill out surveys! In addition to the multiple choice questions, there were opportunities for open-ended responses and a couple of experimental sections. Your written responses added an additional layer of depth; one which is difficult to summarize for a post like this. Please know that all comments will be shared with those they concern. (This includes a full set of unedited and unredacted results which goes to the Head Support and Evaluation Committee of our Board of Trustees.) As you can see, we really do use this data to make enhancements and improvements each year.

We very much wish to continue into next year, this year’s trend in maintaining and increasing positive outcomes and satisfaction. To mix school metaphors, each year simply becomes the higher “floor” we stand upon to reach towards our North Stars. With no ceiling, we aim to reach a little closer each time.

The Transparency Files: Self-Evaluation

With all the unpredictability of yet another pandemic year, the one thing that you can be sure of as the calendar turns to May and June, is that I will deliver you a series of “Transparency Files” blog posts! OJCS Parents have recently received their link to our Annual Parent Survey, and so I will again begin with a self-evaluation and will continue with the sharing of results of that survey, the results from our Annual Faculty Survey (which is shared directly with them) and will conclude with a discussion of next year and an introduction of the 2022-2023 OJCS Faculty. [If this year is more like last year, these posts will not follow week-by-week.]

You are welcome to review last year’s self-evaluation post before moving onto this year’s. Unlike in prior years, I am going to skip the cutting-and-pasting from my goal-setting document and simply present to you a few big ideas that come from my “principal’s” bucket, and not as much from my “head of school’s” bucket (i.e. fundraising, marketing, budgeting, etc.).

…one of the big highlights of the year has been the successful (re)launch of Junior Kindergarten at OJCS! I wrote a long post in December that I encourage you check out if you want to know what makes JK at OJCS so unique and special. A year ago we had no teacher, no students and a program on paper – we now have a master teacher, a thriving class and a program that is we know is setting up our students for success in SK. We appreciate and respect that Jewish parents in Ottawa have choices, and our focus will be ensuring that we continue to offer a program that is unlike the others, aligned with our OJCS North Stars and best prepares students for elementary school. Want to know more or to secure your spot for 2022-2023? Please contact Jenn Greenberg ([email protected]) for a tour or registration materials.

…one of the biggest initiatives that we were able to “unpause” from COVID was the [soft] launch of our “Mitzvah Trips” for Middle School. Please follow this link for the details of this initiative. For this year, our students have collaborated on projects with Tamir and JFS and will be engaging with Hillel Lodge in the weeks to come. More important than what I believe about this work, here is what our students believe about this work:

“It feels good to help those in need.”

“We want to continue to make others feel happy.”

“It’s nice to know that we are actually using what we learn in Jewish Studies.”

Yes, it is. This is poised to be a game-changer for Middle School at OJCS.

…speaking of big initiatives that got “un-paused” this year? We finally were able to move forward with the (re)launch of our OJCS Makerspace [built with a gift from the Congregation Beth Shalom Legacy Fund]. Thanks to a generous grant by the Jewish Federation of Ottawa‘s Fund for Innovative Capacity Building, OJCS worked with Future Design School over the balance of this school year on a strategic makerspace consultancy. I shared the result of this work and its next steps in a blog post. The relaunch of the OJCS Makerspace will help move our school that much closer to our North Stars and make learning that much more motivating and engaging for our students. We can’t wait to see what our students invent and create!

…we held our CAIS (Canadian Association of Independent Schools) Accreditation Site Visit on May 11th! This was the first exciting step (although I guess doing all the preliminary paperwork was pretty “exciting”!) on our journey towards accreditation – both satisfying a longstanding strategic goal and, hopefully, helping parents in our community better understand how we fit into the private school landscape, as OJCS will – eventually – join Ashbury and Elmwood as the only CAIS Accredited schools in Ottawa. The accreditation team consisted of the Head of School and CFO from Ashbury and the Head of School of the Solomon Schechter Academy of Montreal. We held a full schedule of activities and look forward to their feedback.

What did not get done or what still needs work?

A lot!

First order of business will be carving out a new normal that prioritizes health and safety, resuming paused activities and deciding what from COVID-functioning (like continuing to make virtual options for Parent-Teacher Conferences or Generations Day available) should carry forward. We have learned so much as a school during these last three years and we are determined to come out stronger, wiser and better on the other side.

Second order of business will be reconnecting with our families and our community. We aspire to be more than a school, but we have had to restrict our access and our bandwidth during these years of scarcity due to COVID. What can we do differently next year? What should we do differently next year? What should PTA be and look like? What kinds of friend-raising activities could we or should we be facilitating or encouraging for OJCS parents? What kinds of Jewish experiences could we be promoting or providing for OJCS families?

Third order of business will be moving forward on our amazing $1.5 million reimagination of classrooms at OJCS thanks to an anonymous gift we received this year! We are pleased to share that we have now selected an architect firm – Figurr – and look forward to the exciting work ahead. The future of education in Ottawa really will be built right here at OJCS!

Those are just highlights.

If you have already contributed feedback through our surveys, thank you. [Remember the deadline for your feedback to be included in reporting is May 13th.] Your (additional and/or direct) feedback – whether shared publicly, privately through email or social media, or shared through conversation – is greatly appreciated. As I tell our teachers, I look forward to getting better at my job each year and I am thankful for the feedback I receive that allows me to try.

Please stay tuned for a MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT that will surely warm the hearts of those who place high value on French language and a MAJOR UPDATE on the future of Jewish Studies. There is A LOT to be excited about as we prepare to take the next big steps forward at OJCS!

The Transparency Files: CAT4 Results (Yes, Even During COVID) Part II

Welcome to “Part II” of our analysis of this year’s CAT4 results! In Tuesday’s post, we provided a lot of background context and shared out the simple results of how we did this year. Here in our second post, we are now able to begin sharing comparative data, however patchy. It will take at least one more non-COVID year before we can accurately compare the same grade and the same cohort year after year. But we can get a taste of it with Grades 5-8. What you have below are snapshots of the same cohort (the same group of children) from 2019 to 2021 (with bonus data from 2018’s Grade 3):

What are the key takeaways from this comparison (remembering that any score that is two grades above ending in “.9” represents the max score, like getting an “8.9” for Grade 7)?

Now bear in mind, that the metric we are normally looking at when it comes to comparing a cohort over time is whether or not we see at least one full year’s growth (on average) each year – here we are looking to see two full year’s growth since we last took the test in 2019. This would be the place one might expect to see the full measure of COVID’s impact – these are the two years of COVID between the two tests. However, for all four cohorts in all categories save two (2019 Grade 3 to 2021 Grade 5 “Computation & Estimation” and 2019 Grade 5 to 2021 Grade 7 “Spelling”) you see at least two full year’s growth (technically 2019 Grade 5 to 2021 Grade 7 “Computation & Estimation” was just shy) and in may cases you see more than two full year’s growth.

I’m going to say that again.

During the time of the pandemic, with all the pivots back and forth, all the many challenges of both hyflex and at-home learning, all the prolonged absences by many students (and teachers), with all the social and emotional stress and anxiety, with everything we know about what COVID has been doing to children and to families, in almost each category that we tested our students in Grades 5-8 – spending no time or energy preparing for the exams and with diverse and inclusive classes – in 22 of 24 domains we see at least the pre-COVID expected two-year gain, and in many cases we see more than two full year’s growth.

As was true with our overall scores, I was expecting to see a significant number of gaps for all the reasons I just described, but surprisingly and encouragingly, that is not what the data yields.

Let’s look at one more set data points. We can also get a taste of how the same grade performs from one year to the next as well. Again, we only have Grades 5-8 to look at with (with a bonus 2018 Grade 6):

Now, remember that these scores represent a completely different group of children, so it is not unusual or surprising to see variances. Teachers can only grow students from the place they received them and it is that annual growth that we are concerned with. But over time you are looking for patterns. Ideally each domain settles in at least a full grade above with slight fluctuations from year to year depending on that year’s particular constellation of students. Even-better would be to see slight ticks up each year as a result of new ideas, new pedagogies, new programs, etc. And that is actually where much of the story currently is.

In the places where we aren’t quite where we want to be, we still have work to do. If with additional data we come to believe that Spelling or Computation & Estimation are institutional weaknesses, we will want to know whether they are weakness in every grade or do they dip in certain grades. Between COVID and gaps in testing, we simply have no way to conclude much more than we have already laid out. But in another year or so, we will be able to plot the trajectory of both cohorts (the same students) and grades over time to see what additional stories they tell.

To try sum up both posts, we have a lot to be proud of in our standardized test scores. We have two areas (Spelling and Computation & Estimation) to prioritize in two grades (Five & Seven). With regard to Spelling, it is interesting to note that when we flagged it in 2019 as a more global concern, we began providing professional growth opportunities for language arts teachers in our school on Structured Word Inquiry. The sample sizes are too small to make grand conclusions, but it is possible that those interventions help explain why Spelling is no longer a global concern, although we do need to pay attention to where and why it is lagging where it is. With regard to Computation & Estimation, we will – like with Spelling – have an internal conversation which may lead to PD for Math Teachers.

This fits in with the work we began on our November PD Day which focused on “Data-Driven Decision Making”. The Math and Language Arts Teachers in Grades 5-8 will be meeting to go through CAT4 results in greater detail, with an eye towards what kinds of interventions are needed now – in this year – to fill any gaps (both for individual students and for grades); and how might we adapt about our long-term planning to ensure we are best meeting needs.

And now again this year, despite all the qualifications and caveats, and in the face of the most challenging set of educational circumstances any generation of students and teachers have faced, our CAT4 scores continue to demonstrate excellence. Excellence within the grades and between them.

Not a bad place to be as we prepare to open the 2022-2023 enrollment season…

The Transparency Files: CAT4 Results (Yes, Even During COVID) Part I

This may seem like a very odd time to be sharing out results from this year’s standardized testing, which in our school is the CAT4. We are just finishing up our first days in this year’s most recent pivot back to distance learning and we are confident that everyone – students, parents and teachers – has more pressing concerns than a very long and detailed analysis of standardized tests that we managed to squeeze in during the in-person portion of our school year. (The post is so long that I am splitting it into two parts, and each part is still a bit lengthy.) But with our launch of Annual Grades 9 & 12 Alumni Surveys and the opening of the admissions season for the 2022-2023 school year, one might argue that there is not a better time to be more transparent about how well we are (or aren’t) succeeding academically against an external set of benchmarks while facing extraordinary circumstances.

There is a very real question about “COVID Gaps” and the obvious impacts on children and schools from the many pivots, hyflex, hybrid, masked and socially-distanced, in-person and at-home learning experiences we have all cycled through together since March of 2020. (I wrote earlier in the year about some of the non-academic COVID gaps that we are very much experiencing, all of which I imagine growing proportionate to the length of this current pivot.) And it seems logical that there should be and are academic gaps, at least at the individual student level. One might ask why we even bothered taking the CAT4 at all this year; we didn’t take it last school year for example, so it will be really hard to make meaningful apples-to-apples comparisons. So why take them? And why share the results, whatever they may be?

We did it for a few reasons…

The first and primary reason is that we are curious. Curiosity may not be a “North Star” at OJCS, but it is a value. And we are very curious to see how our standardized test scores measure up pre-COVID and post-COVID, both by grade (2019 Grade 5 v. 2021 Grade 5) and by cohort (2019 Grade 5 v. 2021 Grade 7). We would normally be looking for patterns and outliers anyway, but now we can also look for COVID impacts as well.

Why share the results? Because that’s what “transparency” as a value and a verb looks like. We commit to sharing the data and our analysis regardless of outcome because we believe in the value of transparency. We also do it because we know that for the overwhelming majority of our parents, excellence in secular academics is a non-negotiable, and that in a competitive marketplace with both well-regarded public schools and secular private schools, our parents deserve to see the school’s value proposition validated beyond anecdotes.

Now for the caveats and preemptive statements…

We have not yet shared out individual reports to our parents. First our teachers have to have a chance to review the data to identify which test results fully resemble their children well enough to simply pass on, and which results require contextualization in private conversation. Those contextualizing conversations will take place in the next few weeks and thereafter, we should be able to return all results.

There are a few things worth pointing out:

Because of COVID, this is now only our third year taking this assessment at this time of year. We were in the process of expanding the range from Grades 3-8 in 2019, but we paused in 2020 and restricted this year’s testing to Grades 5-8. This means that we can only compare at the grade level from 2019’s Grades 5-8 to 2021’s Grades 5-8, and we can only compare at the cohort level from 2019’s Grades 3-6 to 2021’s Grades 5-8. And remember we have to take into account the missing year…this will make more sense in “Part II” (I hope). Post-COVID, we will have tracking data across all grades which will allow us to see if…
- The same grade scores as well or better each year.
- The same cohort grows at least a year’s worth of growth.

The other issue is in the proper understanding of what a “grade equivalent score” really is.

Grade-equivalent scores attempt to show at what grade level and month your child is functioning. However, grade-equivalent scores are not able to show this. Let me use an example to illustrate this. In reading comprehension, your son in Grade 5 scored a 7.3 grade equivalent on his Grade 5 test. The 7 represents the grade level while the 3 represents the month. 7.3 would represent the seventh grade, third month, which is December. The reason it is the third month is because September is zero, October is one, etc. It is not true though that your son is functioning at the seventh grade level since he was never tested on seventh grade material. He was only tested on fifth grade material. He performed like a seventh grader on fifth grade material. That’s why the grade-equivalent scores should not be used to decide at what grade level a student is functioning.

But I also don’t want to undersell the objective evidence that shows that the work we are doing here does in fact lead to tangible success. That’s the headline, but let’s look more closely at the story. (You may wish to zoom (no pun intended!) in a bit on whatever device you are reading this on…)

A few tips on how to read this:

We take this exam in the “.2” of each grade-level year. That means that “at grade level” [again, please refer above to a more precise definition of “grade equivalent scores”] for any grade we are looking at would be 5.2, 6.2, 7.2, etc. For example, if you are looking at Grade 6, anything below 6.2 would constitute “below grade level” and anything above 6.2 would constitute “above grade level.”
The maximum score for any grade is “.9” of the next year’s grade. If, for example, you are looking at Grade 8 and see a score of 9.9, on our forms it actually reads “9.9+” – the maximum score that can be recorded.
Because of when we take this test – approximately two months into the school year – it is reasonable to assume a significant responsibility for results is attributable to the prior year’s teachers and experiences. But it is very hard to tease it out exactly, of course.

What are the key takeaways from these snapshots of the entire school?

Looking at four different grades through six different dimensions there are only three instances (out of twenty-four) of scoring below grade-level: Grade 5 in Computation & Estimation (4.4), and Grade 7 in Spelling (6.6) and Computation & Estimation (6.0).
Interestingly, compared to our 2019 results, those two dimensions – Spelling and Computation & Estimation are no longer globally lower as a school relative to the other dimensions. In 2019, for example “Spelling” was a dimension where we scored lower as a school (even if when above grade level) relative to the other dimensions. In 2021, we don’t see “Spelling” as scoring globally below. (That’s a good thing!) [We also have some anecdotal evidence that a fair number of students in Grade 7 may not have finished the Computation section, leaving a fair number of questions blank – in the case of this cohort, it might be more valuable to know how well they did on the questions they actually answered (which we will do).]

What stands out the most is how exceedingly well each and every grade has done in just about each and every section. In almost all cases, each and every grade is performing significantly above grade-level. This is NOT what I was expecting considering the impacts of COVID over the last two years – I was fully expecting to see at least .5 (a half-year) gap globally across the grades and subjects. This is a surprising and very encouraging set of data points.

Stay tuned for “Part II” in which we will dive into the comparative data – of both the same grade and the same cohort (the same group of students) over time – and offer some additional summarizing thoughts.