Amid a trend of declining test scores, state education leaders launched a new resource last week that tailors math and reading materials to individual students’ abilities.
The Vermont Agency of Education contracted with MetaMetrics, an education assessment and data analytics company, to provide the materials to Vermont’s K-12 schools.
MetaMetric’s “Lexile” and “Quantile” products suggest books, worksheets, and instructional videos based on a student’s individual math and English scores. Those scores are generated using a student’s results on standardized tests.
Thursday’s announcement is in no small part a reaction to recent news that test scores continue to stagnate or decline, with students losing the most ground in reading.
“This is the beginning of a larger strategy for us to engage with legislative leaders around a focused policy approach on improving literacy outcomes for students,” Secretary of Education Dan French said in an interview.
All Vermont school districts will have free access to MetaMetrics products, agency officials said, but they will not be required to use them.
While federal law only requires statewide standardized testing in certain grades – starting in grade 3 – most school districts administer so-called benchmark tests several times a year to track a student’s individual progress, including in the much earlier grades. French said MetaMetric’s tools will allow districts to couple a student’s benchmark testing to their results on federally mandated assessments.
“It gives them the ability to connect them to the SBAC scores, which are now – in most districts’ minds – isolated activities,” French said, referring to the statewide math and English tests Vermont schools administer each year.
That should allow districts to more comprehensively track a student’s progress through time, he said, and target interventions accordingly.
The annual cost for the MetaMetrics tools will be about $178,000, according to the state, plus $67,000 in one-time set-up expenses. Agency officials say federal funds – not state or local dollars – are paying for the initiative.
MetaMetrics, which is based in North Carolina, has similar partnerships in place with at least 17 other states, according to the company’s website.
Vermont Principals Association executive director Jay Nichols said he didn’t know much about the company, but said he was “encouraged” the agency was exploring new tools to help districts.
“Meeting students where they are academically and providing them with the right level of instruction and interventions as necessary is critical to children’s academic success,” he said.
And Jeff Francis, the executive director of the Vermont Superintendents Association, called the initiative “a worthwhile effort to make better use of data.”
“The initiative will help the state to translate local data into comparative data that can be used for longitudinal assessment for reading and math,” he said.
Senate Education committee chair Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden, said the proposal was a win for schools, since the products would be free and since it would be each district’s choice whether or not to use MetaMetric’s services.
“Some will and some won’t, but either way it is still the work of gifted human beings – we call them ‘teachers’ – to create meaningful, three-dimensional classroom instruction,” he said.
