Where the district-specific data is concerned, Ogden-area school districts join others around the country in facing challenges relative to student performance in subjects like reading and math.

The Standard-Examiner spoke with officials from both Ogden School District and Weber School District to assess their take on the data presented in the report as well as steps that are being taken to bolster student performance.

Ogden School District

According to the Education Recovery Scorecard, Ogden School District has seen significant drops in both math and reading performance coming out of the pandemic.

Math performance among grades 3 through 8 had dropped to nearly two grade equivalents below the national average — a level akin to where the district was in 2011. Math performance was down 0.71 grade equivalents since 2019. As for reading performance among grades 3 through 8, Ogden School District was rated at dropping 0.54 grade equivalents since 2019.

Ogden School District Superintendent Luke Rasmussen said there are some things the results don’t quite show.

“This report is measuring grades 3 through 8 in the RISE Assessment,” he said.

Ogden School District Executive Director of Student Achievement Adam McMickell said this test measures several facets that can be oversimplified in studies like the Education Recovery Scorecard.

“I don’t want anyone to walk away thinking this is purely about Ogden’s inability to get students to learn to read,” he said. “The RISE test is a comprehensive language arts assessment that measures all of the skills from comprehension to synthesis to language vocabulary and grammar. These reports tend to distill it down to the word ‘reading’ and I think it just invites some confusion where we don’t need to have that confusion.”

Rasmussen added that contributing to the numbers is the rapid fluctuation rate of Ogden School District student enrollment.

“One of the things that we look at in Ogden is our mobility rate,” he said. “Students move schools at least one time every 160 days of school. That can be within our district, out of our district or into our district. Our mobility rate hovers in that 20-21% range, which means we have 20%-ish of our students who are moving schools within 160 days, which is a big challenge for us. Then we have a lot of MLL (multilingual learner) students — one of the highest percentages in the state in regards to that — as well as the highest free and reduced lunch numbers.”

McMickell said the pandemic had a huge impact on students and their performance.

“That type of disruption impacted almost every single factor that contributes to a student’s success — from our absentee rates to their perceptions of school — it disrupted their academic trajectory,” he said. “Even when we came back and our teachers and our staff did an amazing job in that first year coming back … it wasn’t operating as it did before that first year.”

He said these impacts were especially exacerbated in areas with larger vulnerable populations.

“We don’t use that as an excuse; however, we do recognize that as a data point that we act on,” he said.

The Ogden School District has been taking several approaches to improve its scores, especially with its youngest students.

“We know we have a lot of work to do in the RISE area,” Rasmussen said. “Where we focus a lot of our attention and a lot of our resources — knowing that we want to get the biggest bang for the buck — is in the early learning space. We put a lot of resources and efforts markedly after the pandemic into this space, and we’ve started to see results. We know that if we can help those kids in K through 3, it will trickle up and on the assessment you’re seeing on that national report, you will eventually see improvement in that 3 through 8 space.”

He said that based on the 2023 numbers, those results have been significant.

“We had the highest at- or above-benchmark in first grade since 2016-2017 in our district,” he said. “For the first time in grades 1 through 3, we actually met the state goal of 60% of our students having typical or better reading growth, which is the first time in the history of the district that we’ve been able to do that.”

McMickell said the focus on younger students doesn’t mean the district isn’t paying attention to other grade levels.

“We are tending to all of our academic challenges in every grade level,” he said. “That investment in early literacy and early numeracy as well is significant for us because we see students having a compounded effect from year to year and we’ll see the results of that.”

Another key to improvement, according to Rasmussen, has been teacher retention.

“We had a goal on our strategic plan, by 2030, to retain at least 85% of our educators,” he said. “We’ve been able to surpass that already in retaining 87% of our educators.”

He said the district used to onboard as many as 100 new teachers per year while the last three years, that number has been closer to 30 per year.

“When we can keep great teachers and great people, we are going to be able to continue to have better results,” he said.

Weber School District

Contrastingly, Weber School District has seen an uptick recently in math performance among grades 3 through 8, as tracked in the Education Recovery Scorecard, moving closer to the national average (and within 0.05 grade equivalents of its 2019 mark). Reading performance among the same grades, meanwhile, was down 0.64 grade equivalents compared to the pre-pandemic mark.

Bryan Becherini, Weber School District’s director of assessment, school improvement, grants & research, said the Education Recovery Scorecard uses sound methodology, but he similarly referenced class turnover as well as the difference in how the state and district evaluate student progression relative to the scorecard in appraising overall performance.

“If we were to look at seventh- and eighth-grade RISE every two years, it’s a 100% turnover in the group of kids,” Becherini said. “So, part of it is the state does the accountability on growth. It’s not a value add, it’s a growth percentile. So, there are some differences, right, when we look at our state report card data versus the data within that report.”

Nevertheless, Weber School District Superintendent Gina Butters said that district leadership has prioritized improving math and reading performance, and academic success at large, across all grade levels.

“We’ve moved to a very intentional focus on assessment and student performance,” Butters said. “That’s not to say that it wasn’t in place before because, of course, we’re an educational institution. And, of course, learning is the outcome that we’re all after, right? Making sure kids are learning at high levels. But I think the difference that we can see in terms of Weber School District across the last three years is the expertise we have brought in and the intentional focus that we’ve put around stressing assessments, stressing student outcomes and looking at data to determine growth and where we’re headed.”

Last year, the district unveiled its “Elevate 28” program, in which academic excellence is a focal point. In doing so, new strategies and long-term goals for pre-K to sixth-grade achievement, seventh to 12th-grade achievement and “future-ready learners and leaders” have been established at the district level.

Becherini, Curriculum & Instruction Director Heather Neilson and others have been hired to aid educators in working toward and meeting those goals.

“We have an instructional coach at every school that we’re doing ongoing training with every Friday just around practices and strengthening tier-one instruction,” Neilson said. “We also are out at schools. Bryan and I spend time with all of our elementary schools doing these data dives where we look at their data in detail. We identify areas of need and then we work directly with the school to fix the areas of concern that we’re seeing.”

Neilson added that the district is working closely with practitioners in schools to build ideas and see how they translate into practice, tweaking instructional routines and engaging in direct teaching of educators, which she said has translated to better practice.

While individual schools and administrators have taken their own avenues toward evaluating and improving student outcomes previously, Butters said an important part of the Elevate 28 program has been a transition from site-based strategies to a top-down approach that aligns with district-level goals.

“We’ve been trying to build that team concept that we’re all in this, all of these kids in our district are all of our kids, regardless of where they attend, regardless of which homes they come from or circumstances,” Butters said. “And we’re going to get them all there, we’re going to do it together, and we’re going to follow this prescribed path.”

The district pointed to one of its elementary schools — a Title I school where more than 50% of the students are economically disadvantaged, according to Becherini — as a prime example of the strides that have been made already.

“In 2021, only 7% of their kindergarteners were reading on grade level,” Becherini said. “It’s not a perfect cohort where we’re just tracking students that stayed, but … that kindergarten team last year had 73% of their students reading on grade level.”

While the Education Recovery Scorecard evaluates student performance relative to the pandemic and pre-pandemic performance, Weber School District Assistant Superintendent Dave Hales said the district is squarely focused on what’s happening with students now and what ought to happen in the future.

“We know that the pandemic happened. That was real. It impacted us. But, really, what we’re doing is assessing very, very carefully where children are now and moving them from where they are,” Hales said. “So, even though we know that that happened and that was a difficulty, for sure, in our past, we’re not really putting a lot of blame away on that. We’re just taking kids and assessing them from today and going forward.”