Year one of Summit Learning in two Kentucky schools

Two middle schools in Kentucky’s Boone County Public School District adopted the Summit Learning program – one of the more frequently discussed digital learning programs – in the 2016-17 school year. We now have the first year of KPREP test results for those schools to examine, and I’ll be doing that in a couple of blogs over the next few weeks.

For a little background, Summit originated in California’s Summit Charter Schools around six years ago and was made available to the Boone County system by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame, who operates a foundation that finances programs to help teachers get up to speed on how Summit works and to supply the digital support needed.

At least, that is what should happen. But, the implementation of Summit Learning in Boone County has been problematic, as you can learn by clicking the “Read more” link below.

For those already up to speed on Summit, let’s look at some actual KPREP results after Summit Learning’s first year in Boone County’s Camp Ernst Middle School and Conner Middle School. I’ll start with math, because this is where the picture seems clearest, and most problematic.

These tables and graphs compare the KPREP results for different student groups in Camp Ernst and Connor to the Kentucky statewide middle school average results (click on graphic to enlarge if necessary). The far-right column in each table shows the change in KPREP math proficiency rates between 2015-16 and 2016-17 for each of the listed student groups. When the proficiency rates went down for a student group in a school, the change is shaded in salmon color.

Camp Ernst - Conner - KY - KPREP Math to 2017

There are obvious reasons for concern here. Most student groups, and the student body as a whole (All Students) in both middle schools saw a reduction in their proficiency rate in middle school math between 2015-16 and 2016-17.In Camp Ernst, only the African-American students saw math improvement at the end of year one of Summit Learning. In Conner, only African-Americans and Hispanics saw improvement. However, while the Hispanic improvement was quite substantially improved in Conner, that performance stands in very sharp contrast to the Hispanic performance in Camp Ernst, where Hispanic math proficiency dropped even more substantially.

When we examine the statewide average middle school trends, all student groups either saw their math proficiency remain essentially stable (the African-American drop was very small) or increase across the entire state of Kentucky between 2015-16 and 2016-17.Several student groups in particular had problems in Summit’s year one. Students with learning disabilities and those eligible for the federal school lunch program both saw drops in proficiency in both Boone County schools.

Even worse, the students with learning disabilities in both schools performed notably below the math proficiency rate for their counterparts across Kentucky. That is particularly problematic because Boone County is an upscale system by Kentucky’s standards.

The below statewide average math performance for students in the school lunch program in Camp Ernst and the not-much-better-than-statewide average in Conner are also problematic.

White students also saw math proficiency decay in both schools. Of special concern is that drop in white scores in 2016-17 in Camp Ernst that brought that proficiency rate below the statewide average for white students.

So, at the end of year one of Summit Learning in these two Boone County schools, you could say the program might help African-Americans a bit in math, but lots of other student groups paying a penalty for that.

Still, this is only year one of the program, which Boone County educators have admitted suffered some implementation headaches. So, while Summit Learning certainly isn’t an instantaneous silver bullet, it’s too soon to declare failure, as well.

Here is more background on Summit.

The Boone County experience shows that Summit, which offers a full curriculum along with its heavily digital learning mode model of lesson delivery, apparently can be very challenging to introduce. For many teachers, this is totally unknown territory.

The Summit approach attempts to blend digital delivery with more traditional classroom instruction, but the exact amount of blending that is needed seems open to question and apparently is still a work in progress.

At an even more basic level, there seems to be a lot of confusion about what Summit actually is. Is it curriculum, or just supporting material? These unanswered questions led to some significant problems with Summit’s adoption in Boone County vis-à-vis Kentucky’s School-Based Decision-Making (SBDM) laws, as we reported earlier.

The Kentucky Office of Education Accountability (OEA) determined that Summit, as its own web site claims, is indeed a curriculum. However, even if Summit Learning was only supporting material for the school’s chosen curriculum, it still would have to be approved by each school’s SBDM council before it could be legally implemented.

Thanks to the confusion about what Summit really is, SBDM approval wasn’t obtained before Summit Learning started. In fact, there wasn’t any vetting against Kentucky’s Academic Standards, either. That was also problematic because Summit was created to work in California, not Kentucky.

In consequence of not conducting proper adoption of Summit under Kentucky’s SBDM laws, several education leaders in Boone County got their fingers rapped by OEA with a requirement for corrective training on the SBDM rules.

In general, Summit has been the subject of both praise and criticism in Boone County. I’ve certainly heard from school staff in Boone County who are excited about the program, for example. But, parents have complained as well, saying they felt coerced into letting their child enter the program and are concerned about many things including how digital data collection and use might impact student privacy.

These are on-going developments, and you can learn more about with a little Googling.

For now, as I said earlier, only one year of performance data is insufficient to draw firm conclusions about an education program, but the first year of KPREP data does raise a possibility that Summit Learning isn’t working as well as it should in the area of math. In future posts we will see that in other subject areas the picture of Summit’s performance remains more opaque.

Technical Notes:

The math proficiency rate information comes from the Kentucky School Report Cards web site. The specific location for the scores is under the DELIVERY_TARGETS, PROFICIENCY/GAP tab. You need to click on the links labeled “Middle School - All Students” to open up each academic section to show the scores for student subgroups, which are listed in the “Actual Score” rows.